


aching now to let you in

by lolohannah



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Angst and Fluff and Smut, Canon Compliant, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Missing Scene, i'm covering the whole damn show here with missing moments from beginning to end, look at the freakin' word count
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2019-02-16 09:48:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 75,611
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13051536
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lolohannah/pseuds/lolohannah
Summary: There are the big moments. The moments you remember with startling clarity that are pivotal milestones in your life, in your story. But there are also the smaller moments. The quiet moments that can be overlooked. Those that could be considered forgettable. Those that don’t mean anything until it all clicks into place— and then, suddenly, they mean everything. That’s what falling in love is like for Stiles and Lydia. Slow, careful, guarded— until every moment becomes part of their story.





	1. Part 1

**Author's Note:**

> Oh boy, it's finally here. I started this in April 2017 and it's finally being posted in December 2017. I didn't know it would become this. It was just supposed to be a 'Missing Moments' fic and it became bigger than I could possibly imagine. Honestly, this fic means the world to me, and to finally put it out here into the world is both terrifying and exciting. I hope there are still enough people left in the fandom to read it haha.
> 
> I have to thank Rachel (aka writergirl8/rongasm) for being the most amazing beta and support to ever exist. She basically deserves a co-writing credit on this fic because of how much she helped me work out the kinks (not those kind, ya pervs!). I can't thank her enough, she's an angel and the best inspiration one could possibly have.
> 
> There's a playlist I created to go along with this fic that you can find [here](https://open.spotify.com/user/1112204469/playlist/2d19JNhaSLb7CW8I8uqJPY). The title comes from the song Hurricane by Fleurie.

 

There are the big moments. The moments you remember with startling clarity that are pivotal milestones in your life, in your story. But there are also the smaller moments. The quiet moments that can be overlooked. Those that could be considered forgettable. Those that don’t mean anything until it all clicks into place— and then, suddenly, they mean _everything_. That’s what falling in love is like for Stiles and Lydia. Slow, careful, guarded— until every moment becomes part of their story.

 

\--

Stiles collapses heavily into the chair beside the fitting rooms with a sigh. He had never considered that shopping with Lydia would be so exhausting. He’s basically been her pack mule for the last hour as he trudged around Macy’s in her shadow. The store assistant finally returns to the entrance of the fitting rooms after setting up Lydia with her array of formal dresses. He assumes he’s in for the long haul as his foot bounces up and down against the worn carpet with a rhythmic tapping sound.

“Your girlfriend certainly has good taste,” the assistant says to Stiles with a polite smile.

His eyes widen, “Oh, she’s not-”

“Not his girlfriend!” Lydia calls back pointedly from behind the curtain.

“Yeah,” Stiles replies awkwardly, motioning in Lydia’s direction. He slumps a little more in his chair at how quick she is to correct anyone who might think they’re romantically linked.

“Ah. Sorry,” the assistant says, coming over to sit in the chair beside him. “Should I be sorry?” she whispers teasingly, eyes flicking over to the room where Lydia is and then back to Stiles, she raises her eyebrows.

Stiles chuckles and looks down, shaking his head a little in a disheartened way. “You should,” he answers, voice heavy with longing.

The young woman looks at him sympathetically, nodding in understanding as she rests her hands on her knees. “Well, hang in there,” she consoles. “She might change her mind someday, you seem like a nice guy,” the woman adds and nudges her shoulder against his. Stiles’ mouth twists up into a gentle smile of thanks. Giving up on his feelings for Lydia has always been an impossibility, not that he’s ever even wanted to try. Waiting for her get out of the fitting room isn’t the only long haul he’s signed up for.

“Look, can I get some assistance in here or are you too busy flirting with an underage high school boy to do _your job_ ,” Lydia snaps from behind them, her head peeking out from the side of the curtain, an irate expression on her face.

Stiles can’t help the loud cackle that escapes his mouth, covering it with his hand a little too late to muffle it. Lydia is downright vicious when it comes to getting what she wants from department store staff and he can’t help but admire her gall. The assistant looks affronted for a moment before she rushes over to Lydia, slipping behind the curtain to help her with her dress. Stiles pulls out his phone and texts Scott that he’s dress shopping with Lydia, which earns him a response of ‘ _Congrats, you poor sucker’._ Scott and he continue to text back-and-forth whilst he waits for Lydia to finish up trying on dresses; a dress she’ll be wearing when he takes her to the formal. _God bless Allison_ , he thinks, unable to wipe the content smile off of his face at the opportunity he’s been given.

He’s disturbed by a pointed cough and Lydia stands before him, changed back into her previous clothes and her chosen dress on a hanger in front of her. Her hair is slightly mussed from its previously perfect style, one of the rare occasions she’s looked anything less than flawless around him. Stiles thinks he can physically feel his eyes lighting up as they flit across her body speedily before focusing on the dress. He studies it, making an exaggerated thoughtful expression and Lydia raises an eyebrow confrontationally as if daring him to make a comment. It’s the one he liked best from the large stack she acquired and he grins up at her. “I like it,” he answers.

Lydia scoffs. “Yeah, I don’t care,” she rolls her eyes in exasperation and nudges at his leg with the toe of her shoe. “Get up, I’m finished.” Stiles pushes himself up from his resting place and follows her across the store to the cash registers, hands buried in his pockets.

After paying, he spots Allison coming out of the fitting rooms, dress in hand, and nudges Lydia to signify the direction of her best friend. Lydia nods and turns to face him, the bag with her dress in it swinging back and forth with her sudden movement. Stiles struggles to stop imagining her wearing the dress under the soft lighting of the school gym, whether she’ll grace him with a slow dance— if she might finally _see_ him.

“You’re wearing a white shirt and a black suit, nothing eccentric otherwise you’ll clash with my dress. You’re wearing a tie, not a bowtie.” Lydia’s eyes widen in horror. “Definitely not a bowtie. It should be grayscale. Keep it simple. Classy. If you can do that,” she instructs confidently. He thinks he can see a modicum of insecurity behind her eyes like she’s worried he’s going to embarrass her.

“I can do that,” he responds assuredly. As he goes to walk past her, he leans forward and jests in a low voice, “I needed an excuse to burn my bowtie collection after all.” And even though he doesn’t see her response, he can imagine her rolling her eyes at him as he leaves. 

\--

Lydia stares into the mirror in contemplation, running the bright red lipstick over her lips like a weapon that will preserve her dignity. She’s going to the winter formal with _Stiles_ . Dorky, hyperactive Stiles who stares at her longer than the rest of the student body combined. And that’s saying something because everybody stares at Lydia. She’s doing this because she betrayed Allison by kissing Scott, and this is her punishment. A night spent watching Jackson dance with her best friend while she sits bored to tears alongside Scott’s obsessive best friend. _Joy_.

[7:10 pm] Unknown: _Hey, I’m outside_.

[7:10 pm] Lydia: _How did you get my number?_

[7:11 pm] Unknown: _Allison gave it to me._

[7:11 pm] Lydia: _Of course she did_.

[7:11 pm] Stiles: _Is that okay?_

[7:13 pm] Lydia: _You’re early._

[7:13 pm] Stiles: _Yes? Sorry._

[7:15 pm] Lydia: _Just wait in your car._

[7:15 pm] Stiles: _Got it._

She rolls her eyes and sighs. God forbid she get to be fashionably late and allow this night to have a shorter duration than the print-out ticket labels it as. Lydia picks up her black fascinator and places it atop her head, nestling it in her strawberry blonde waves. She takes a brush and teases her hair, adding volume to the back. Lydia needs to look her best. Even if she doesn’t have the date she wants, he’ll still be there, and she must be utterly desirable. Picture perfect. Lydia is determined to remind him what he’s missing. Nothing less will do.

With careful precision, a routine that makes her calm and focused, Lydia meticulously adds her black earrings and necklace to her ensemble before standing up from her vanity and slipping her heels on. She picks up her black clutch and bends forward, pouting her lips at her reflection as her eyes turn to ice. Lydia would rather give the illusion of being frosty and cold-hearted than let anyone see her in pain. Pain is vulnerability, and Lydia doesn’t like anyone having that amount of control over her.

“This is your car?” Lydia accuses, startling Stiles who flails as he looks up from his phone and across the car with wide eyes to Lydia stood haughtily by the passenger window.

As his mouth falls open in the search for words, his phone drops to the floor of the jeep with a thud. “Damn!” He fumbles to pick it up, sliding it into his ill-fitting suit pocket before he tumbles out of the car, his feet landing on the road noisily.

“What are you doing?” she demands, one hand on her hip and a prickly expression on her face.

“Er...opening the door for you?” Stiles replies anxiously, coming to stand beside her, one of his hands resting on the car.

Her attitude falters. “Oh,” Lydia contemplates, realizing not once during their relationship had Jackson ever willingly opened a car door for her. Courteous would be the last word she’d describe him as, in fact. Lydia steels herself and flicks her hair, “You know I can do that myself.”

One side of Stiles’ mouth twitches up into a crooked smile. “I know,” he replies deliberately as if the thought would never occur to him that Lydia wasn’t fully capable. He opens the jeep passenger door and reaches for one of Lydia’s hands. She flinches slightly at how warm and reassuring his touch feels on her, the cold of the night already seeping into her pale, uncovered skin. “But it’s a jeep, and pretty high off the ground. I figure you could use the help.”

Lydia’s mouth falls open, offended. “Are you calling me short?”

“If the stiletto fits,” he quips in amusement, urging Lydia into the car.

She scoffs and pulls her hand away from his, clambering into the jeep as elegantly as she can, but she’s well aware of the fact that she must look completely ridiculous. Stiles’ expression becomes a little disheartened when she pushes him away, but he closes the door and scuttles back to the driver’s side sheepishly.

Lydia brushes her hand against the smooth fabric of her dress trying to straighten it out. “My dress is going to crease,” she murmurs, her voice quieter and sadder than she means it to be. _Ice, Lydia, ice._

“Oh,” Stiles replies uncertainly, “sorry about that.” He reaches back to put his seatbelt on and Lydia follows his actions. She looks down at her clutch in her lap, the soft material comforting against her fingertips, like a fashionable shield.

“Yeah, whatever. Can we go now?” Lydia says flippantly, her right heel tapping steadily against the floor.

Stiles watches her quietly for a moment, and Lydia knows he’s studying her. She’s sitting in his car in a beautiful shiny dress, her curls are perfectly positioned (a feat which took her longer than she’d ever admit to anyone), the color of her lipstick was specifically chosen to draw focus and stand out amongst the muted tones of her outfit. Lydia  _tries_. She tries hard to achieve an exact vision. One of irresistibility and rapture. Stiles only allows his gaze to fall upon her for a matter of seconds before he shakes himself out of the moment, facing forwards and turning the ignition.

His car sputters slightly and Lydia lifts an eyebrow accusingly. Stiles closes his eyes and exhales, mumbling “Come on” repeatedly under his breath. Lydia would almost be amused at his desperation if the concept of the jeep not starting didn’t mean she put in all of this effort for nothing. He revs the engine a few more times before it finally starts, causing Stiles to let out a sigh of relief.

“Does the heat work in this thing?” Lydia asks, one of her hands rubbing against her bare arm.

“Yes! Yes, that I can do,” Stiles enthuses, cranking the heat up. He looks around urgently for oncoming vehicles before slowly rolling the car away from the curb. “You must be cold in just that dress.”

“Fashion over comfort, Stiles” Lydia responds nonchalantly, analyzing her nails as he drives them through Beacon Hills towards the school. Towards _Jackson_.

“I’m sure you’d look great in anything,” he mutters, watching the traffic diligently.

Lydia rolls her eyes and pretends not to hear him, taking her phone out of her clutch and looking over her texts. One from Allison saying they’re almost there. Nothing from Jackson. Her heart sinks. 

\--

She feels lighter and freer than she has in ages as she spins in circles and glides across the cool ice of the rink. Lydia tries to push away how she felt when Jackson shoved her against the wall this afternoon. She tries to push away how violent and cruel it felt and how alone it made her feel. She’s been working on autopilot ever since, burying her turmoil deep beneath the surface. After she was labeled the town nut job who wandered around the woods naked for two days, Lydia is in no hurry to let anyone think she’s weak or suffering. Her ability to trust is at an all-time low. As the ice scrapes against the metal of the blades, she finally feels in control again.

Even though she’s just here to keep Stiles company while Allison and Scott have their secret rendezvous, it still feels good to spot his slack-jawed expression across the rink as he admires her skills. It feels better than she thinks it should. Lydia loves the slick, hard and cold properties of the ice. She prides herself on being as much like it as she can. If she makes her surface as impenetrable as possible, she’s less likely to be hurt by others. But the way Stiles looks at her with such awe causes her insides to thaw a little, for some heat to make its way through her blood again. It makes her remember what it's like to feel alive.

Her skates wisp across the rink as she tracks sweeping lines behind her, pulling Stiles along with a smile she's unable to repress. She lets go of his hand and circles around him, his eyes following her with rapt attention as he slowly spins on the spot. “Is there anything you can’t do?” he asks incredulously.

Lydia rolls her eyes but can’t stop the grin breaking through. “Of course,” she responds resolutely, a twinkle in her eye.

“And that is?” Stiles probes, amused.

“Well, I can’t tell you _that_ ,” Lydia says with emphasis. “A lady never reveals her secrets.” She realizes for a moment that she’s almost allowing herself to flirt with Stiles, and she would put a stop to it immediately if she wasn’t actually having fun. It makes her falter for a split second before she’s able to right herself. For once she decides to forgo the repercussions and act without analyzing every possible outcome. Lydia wants to feel good, she struggles to remember the last time she felt that way.

“Lydia, you are perhaps the most interesting person I’ve ever known.” There’s that wonder in his eyes again. It scares her a little just how much this boy seems to idolize her. No one thinks Lydia Martin is interesting, except maybe Allison. Everyone assumes she’s a vapid, social-climbing bitch. Because she makes them. A small lump forms in her throat as she wonders why Stiles doesn’t see her that way.

“Careful, Stiles. That implies that you _know_ me.” Lydia quirks an eyebrow as she changes her pace, skating further away from him and then moving in zig-zagging lines past him. It allows her to create some distance so she’s not in his vicinity as much. She doesn’t want this to be ruined by him going too far and pushing too hard.

He mirrors her new movements, skating cautiously back and forth around their side of the rink, far away from Allison and Scott, the latter of whom keeps crashing to the ground due to his lack of skill. “I’d like to,” Stiles admits nervously, his soft words bouncing off the ice and ringing in her ears like the chime of a clock. _Time’s up. Escape before the carriage turns back into a pumpkin._

_No, you wouldn't_ , she thinks. She keeps so much of herself under lock and key out of fear of how she'll be perceived. It's so much easier to be the cliché high school superficial bitch rather than be real and vulnerable. Lydia’s fine with people disliking a caricature that she’s created because their words and actions can’t hurt her that way. She knows for sure that if Stiles sees beyond the dream girl he's concocted in his fantasies, he'll lose interest and move onto somebody suited for him— maybe a comic book fan or a Princess Leia cosplayer if he’s lucky. Lydia thinks maybe she should let him know she’s not worthy of the fascination he holds and allow him to move on, but she selfishly likes the attention sometimes. He makes her feel stronger somehow, and all too often recently she’s felt like she’s going crazy in between being paralyzed with fear. She likes feeling stronger.

When Lydia spots the blue petals standing out against the pure white of the rink, the scream is bubbling up inside her even before she sees the man’s face roaring below the surface. The wet, freezing ice beneath her knees soaks through her tights and it sends her right back to that night in the shower of her hospital room again. She feels violated. Terrified. Lydia barely senses Stiles’ arms wrap around her as she sobs, and she doesn’t stop crying all the way home.

\--

Stiles knocks on Lydia’s front door tentatively. He takes a deep breath as he tries to prepare himself for the wrath he’s inevitably facing but Stiles is determined to earn her forgiveness. Scott and Allison are monitoring Jackson; this is his chance to make things right.

The door swings open to reveal Lydia, sans heels so she’s much smaller than she usually appears, wearing a long mulberry colored sweater and dark leggings. Her face pinches in annoyance upon the reveal of Stiles on her doorstep, her arms immediately crossing over her chest in full-on defensive mode.

“Hey,” he greets shyly.

Lydia blinks. “What are you doing here?” she questions, her tone clipped.

“I...I wanted to say sorry for leaving you the other night,” Stiles stammers, fidgeting from one foot to the other. Something about Lydia disarms him and turns him back into that awkward little boy who got moony-eyed over the strawberry blonde whose arm used to shoot up for every question in class. Lydia did that until she realized knowing everything wasn’t ‘cool’ and she’d keep her answers to herself instead. Stiles’ attention had already been drawn to her though. He’d notice the way her pencil would scratch over the paper quickly, the way her eyes would light up when she learned something new, the way she’d pull out a book that someone a decade older than her would struggle to read when the weather was too bad to play outside. She’s always been captivating and has only become more so as they’ve gotten older.

She nods, her eyes sweeping over his face somewhat warily. “You wanted to say sorry,” Lydia repeats, she sounds disbelieving but above all, tired.

“Yes?” Stiles answers, his eyes wide. He knew she was pissed about him leaving her, but she seems more disheartened than he assumed she’d be. And he doesn’t dare to hope that that could mean she was affected by his failed promise and that she wanted him to come back. That maybe Lydia was starting to think she could rely on him. He wants to kick his own ass even though being trapped with Derek in a pool by a murderous lizard wasn’t at all his fault.

“For telling me you’d come back to talk to me and then not coming back,” Lydia recites, her fingers teasing her sweater where her right hand rests against her opposite arm.

“Yes!” Stiles enthuses, stepping towards her eagerly. “I’m very sorry about that. Something came up that was out of my control. If I could have come back, I absolutely would have.” He speaks with conviction, hoping above all that she believes him and starts to trust him.

She looks up at him, her sock-covered toes slipping against the hardwood floor of her foyer as she slides her foot back and forth. “What was the reason?” she asks, her voice quiet but clear.

“It…” Stiles pauses, considering what words to use that will inflict the least damage, “...there was something I got tied up with. It was unavoidable.”

Lydia looks down at the floor and shakes her head slightly, looking like he’s failed the pivotal test question that determines his grade for the whole semester. “Why would I believe that?”

Stiles ducks down, trying to get into her field of vision. “Have I ever given you a reason to doubt me?” he inquires. Lydia’s cool eyes flick up to meet his and she glares. Stiles feels his blood run cold.

“You haven’t really given me any reason to trust you either,” she begins. “You say ‘it’ was unavoidable but you won’t tell me what ‘it’ was. Nobody will tell me what the hell happened at Scott’s house either. So I really don’t know why you’re here, Stiles.” Lydia takes a step back and puts a hand on the door, starting to push it closed.

Without thinking he reaches forward to hold it open. “Lydia.”

She glances at the door, her hand on one side and his on the other. An impasse. “No, this was pointless. The other night was pointless. I think you should leave. You clearly have more important things you should be doing.” Her eyes flit up to meet his pointedly, and god does he feel the urge to spill all of the secrets bubbling up in his chest, eager to break out and pour from his lips so she knows she can trust him. He wants her to know that he really does have the best intentions.

“Lydia, please.”

“Stiles, go. I have no tolerance for people that lie to me right now.” She breaks eye contact but maintains her gaze directed towards him, almost as if her resolve is brittle. Stiles thinks if he pushes any harder he may lose any hope of forming a friendship with this girl, and he doesn’t want to risk that, but he needs her to know he’s not one of the bad guys.

“I haven’t lied to you,” he says softly, sounding unconvincing even to his own ears.

Lydia’s hand wraps around the door handle, her knuckles paling as she grips it tightly. “You haven’t told me the truth either. Nobody does.” She says quieter, “It feels the same.”

He had no idea that she had noticed so much, and really he should know by now not to underestimate Lydia. She’s so intelligent and now even _he’s_ guilty of disregarding that in favor of the image she portrays in front of everyone. “But—” Stiles watches her forlornly.

Lydia interrupts him sharply, “Goodbye, Stiles.”

“I’m sorry,” he struggles to vocalize as she slams the door shut in his face.

Stiles walks back to his jeep hopelessly, irritation thrumming through his veins over the concept of what was supposed to be an apology just driving him and Lydia further out of each other’s orbit. The number of people who know about the supernatural is small but ever-growing, Jackson may not believe what he’s been doing but it’s only a matter of time. They won’t be able to keep all of this from Lydia forever, and Stiles isn’t so sure anymore if keeping her in the dark is what’s best for her. He glances back at Lydia’s house, his eyes scanning it before coming to rest upon a bedroom with a soft light glowing from the window. Lydia emerges at the window, a sharp, resentful look is directed towards him as she rips her curtains closed, blocking him out.

He growls in frustration as he wrenches open his car door and drops down into the driver’s seat. He turns the ignition and the car sputters but doesn’t start and it makes him madder, he tries once more and the engine fires up with power. Stiles’ tires screech a little as he pulls away and he thinks that maybe he left a couple of skid marks outside Lydia’s house, just like the trail of lies they’ve been leaving ever since Scott was bitten by Peter Hale on that fateful January night.

\--

Stiles sighs and picks up his phone, finding Lydia’s name in his contacts. He walks to his jeep hurriedly as it rings and he hears the click of the connection. He doesn’t waste time greeting her, instead choosing to dive right in. “You said you wanted to help right?”

“Yes,” she affirms urgently.

“Okay, I’ll pick you up on the way. Are you home?” Stiles presses the phone between his neck and shoulder as he puts his seatbelt on, his hands shaking slightly as fear and adrenaline course through his body.

“I’ll be waiting for you out front.” And she hangs up.

Stiles shakes his head as he throws his phone into the passenger seat. “God help me. This is a terrible idea.” The graze on his cheek burns angrily as he scowls, driving over to Lydia’s house with haste. He doesn’t really want her anywhere near this, but she’ll never trust him again if he leaves her out of it. Not when it's to do with _him_.

“Nice to be included,” she greets as she all but jumps into the jeep.

“Against my better judgment,” he mutters, pulling away from the curb as he begins to race through Beacon Hills into an oncoming showdown. Even though he’s staring at the road, he can see Lydia scowling over at him from the passenger seat and he’d laugh at the look on her face if he wasn’t utterly terrified about what the night could hold.

She sighs, anger deflating. “Stiles, he needs me. I can do this.” Lydia sounds so convinced, so _sure_. He hates that it feels like a vice closing in around his heart, constricting with every heartbeat.

“Lydia, he’s been killing people. If something happens...” Stiles grits his teeth, hands tightening around the steering wheel.

“Then you’ll have been right, won’t you?” she responds pointedly, her mouth twisting in annoyance. The tension bleeds into the atmosphere and makes it a little hard for him to breathe.

Stiles shakes his head. “I don’t want to be right. I want you to be safe,” he insists heatedly. He knows the care and fear buried within his words are plainly obvious, he can’t restrict the way he feels about her even though she doesn’t want that from him. She wants Jackson. Stiles sighs in exasperation. “I said I was sorry.”

“Just drive, Stiles. If there’s a chance I can make this better. Make _him_ better. I’m taking it.”

Lydia sits bolt upright, spine rigid in a way some may see as focused, but Stiles considers to be scared like she's not quite allowing herself to move. He finds that ironic. Her reptilian lover paralyzes people with a simple nick of the claw, and Lydia is immune to it. But she's not immune to him. This is not a world Lydia Martin ever saw herself being part of, he knows that. But part of it, she is.

He sucks his bottom lip into his mouth before remembering the wound inflicted by Gerard. Stiles releases his lip with a wince and speaks through gritted teeth, “Saving him won’t make him better.” He wants to say more, wants to rip into Jackson and who he is and what he’s done. But it won’t change anything. It won’t stop her loving him. She’s dedicated to her cause, and it would be admirable if it wasn’t so likely to get her killed.

“I don’t want to hear it.” Lydia pushes a strand of hair behind her ear nervously— the one clue that her confidence is somewhat wavering, that somewhere inside her she’s doubting her ability to handle this situation.

“Fine.” And the jeep is cast into silence, the rest of the drive fraught with tension. If it comes down to it, Stiles will do whatever he can to make sure Jackson doesn't cause her harm. She doesn't deserve to die because she loves something monstrous.

\--

“Hey, I thought you were with Heather?” Scott asks as Stiles exits the house party, joining the group of Scott, Allison, and Lydia outside on the sidewalk. His body seems to move with more ease than it used to, less gangly and awkward like he’s gained a semblance of control over it during the summer. Lydia remembers the way he shoved his desk away and threw himself over her when the birds attacked in Ms. Blake’s class; how he covered her and shielded her whilst murmuring ‘ _it’s okay, we’ll be okay_ ’ under his breath. She remembers his large hand cradling her head as she tried to block out the sounds of screaming and squawking. Lydia’s not really been aware of Stiles’ body before, but some part of her is suddenly more attuned to it.

“Yeah, she disappeared. I don’t know.” Stiles looks back at the house a little disgruntled. “What’s going on?”

Lydia steps forward, placing her arm alongside Allison’s so the bruised pattern lines up. She's showing it to Stiles, and in a way, it almost feels like she's offering something of herself to him. Or maybe that she's waiting for him to teach her something about the supernatural world that he seems to know so well.

Stiles steps forward, taking hold of Lydia’s wrist gently so he can get a closer look. “Well, that’s weird. What happened?” he asks softly, looking first at Lydia, and then Allison. He subconsciously rubs the pads of his fingers back and forth across Lydia’s wrist and she has to bite back a smile as she watches him surreptitiously.

“This girl came to the school looking for Scott. She grabbed both of our arms and left us with this. We think it might mean something,” Allison explains.

“Something like?” he traces the pattern on Lydia’s arm tenderly around the pen marks she drew. His eyelashes flutter as realization sets in that he's caressing her arm, and he quickly lets go, taking a step back from the girls. Lydia watches him with interest, noticing his cheeks turning slightly rosy while he avoids her eyes, his chest moving somewhat faster with hurried breaths. The corners of her mouth curl upwards in a small smirk.

“Maybe it’s supposed to lead us somewhere. To Erica and Boyd?” Allison suggests.

“In that case,” Stiles turns to look at Scott, hand twitching by his side, “I think we should tell Derek.”

“I’ll call him,” Scott agrees with a gentle nod. “Can you meet us at school tomorrow morning and we’ll show him?”

“Yeah, that’s fine,” Allison says a little begrudgingly at the prospect of a meeting with the man that killed her mother. Lydia puts a supporting hand on her best friend’s elbow as they turn around.

“Wanna go back to mine and have pizza?” Stiles suggests to his best friend somewhat dejectedly.

“You don’t want to try and find Heather?” Scott questions. Lydia eavesdrops from her position next to Allison’s car as she puts her coat and bag in the back seat. She's always been curious, you don't survive high school popularity without being privy to gossip, and Stiles’ behavior this evening has piqued her interest.

“No, she obviously changed her mind. It’s fine.” Stiles rubs his hand over his face and through his hair before glancing at the girls briefly. “See you tomorrow Allison. Lydia.”

Scott echoes Stiles’ goodbye and the girls nod in synchronization as the two boys wander off down the street to the jeep. Allison gets into her car and Lydia follows, appreciating the immediate warmth of the brunette’s vehicle.

“Interesting,” Lydia muses, watching Stiles and Scott in the wing mirror as they walk away. Her tongue rubs against the inside of her cheek as her eyebrows raise in calculated thought.

“Lydia...” Allison warns, recognizing her tone and expression as one of trouble as she starts up the car.

“What?” Lydia responds innocently, a stark contradiction as a mischievous smile crosses her face.

Allison sighs. “I’m not sure I even want to know what you’re thinking.”

Lydia taps her fingers against the car door, a loud rhythm beating from her manicured nails. “It appears Stilinski had a girl in there.”

“And?” Allison laughs a little, glancing at Lydia before she starts driving away.

“Nothing. Guess it didn’t work out.” There’s a wicked glint in her eye.

“Lydia, I know you’re looking for distractions right now…” Allison shrugs one shoulder as she raises an eyebrow. “Don’t make Stiles one of them,” she cautions.

The redhead scoffs. “Of course not. I can have anyone I want, why would I choose Stiles? Plus he's not even my type,” she concurs. So maybe she was checking him out. And maybe the prospect of him hooking up with someone was more interesting to her than she’d have thought it would be. But Lydia Martin has never been interested in pursuing anything with Stiles Stilinski. Never will be. Still, she adds, “But he did look good tonight, didn’t he?”

“Lydia! I never thought I’d see the day,” Allison exclaims, aghast, a cheerful grin lighting up her face that Lydia just adores, even though it’s at her expense.

She scowls. “Oh come on. He got hotter over the summer. It’s an observation. I’m allowed to comment on it even if I’m not going to act on it.” There's still a hole in her heart from Jackson’s abandonment. It hurts that she wasn’t enough of a reason to stay, especially after her love saved his life. Casual sex has been a gratifying way to move on from her heartbreak. The sex has been far more pleasurable than she ever had with Jackson. She could only see him for so long, like tunnel vision, but now there's a wealth of opportunities open to her. New year, new boys. She's ravenous, but she's not stupid enough to pick someone that's had feelings for her. Lydia doesn't want feelings, she wants orgasms— and considering Stiles’ lack of experience, she likely wouldn’t get them from him anyway.

“This is a classic case of somebody trying to take away your toys and you suddenly wanting them back even though you have no use for them,” Allison adds, amusement lacing her tone.

Her mouth drops open and she swats Allison’s arm playfully. “It is not! God, I wish I hadn’t said anything now. Just drop it,” she grumbles, folding her arms across her chest in a defensive measure. She thinks that Allison may have a point, marginally so. It certainly wouldn’t be out of character for her to find someone attractive because other people find them attractive. Lydia doesn’t want to reduce Stiles to a plaything though. It makes something dark stir under her skin that she can't quite pinpoint.

“Mmmhm. Sure. Dropping it,” Allison agrees unconvincingly, a knowing look in her eye that Lydia prefers to ignore.

\--

Stiles paces up and down Lydia’s bedroom while she sits on the end of her bed, watching the carpet move in the direction of his footsteps as he sweeps back and forth. “Try not to freak out okay?” It’s the most hilariously ironic thing he could say at the moment because he’s openly freaking out more than Lydia is.

“Easier said than done,” she replies disconcerted as her eyes follow his hurried movements.

He pauses in his steps, looking over at her inquiringly. She briefly imagines him wearing a Sherlock Holmes costume, complete with magnifying glass as if it will somehow help him solve the mystery of Lydia Martin’s strange behavior.

“Have you had any visions of Peter?”

Lydia shakes her head slightly. “No. Not since he came back.”

It feels good for her to have someone to talk to about this after suffering through it alone last year, even if Stiles doesn’t seem to be any closer to figuring it out than she does.

“So maybe it’s nothing to do with him,” he reasons hopefully.

Lydia’s gaze wanders to the glowing moon outside her window again and a shiver runs down her spine. “But it’s similar. I would wake up screaming.” Just like she did tonight. “He was in my head, Stiles. Twisting things, changing things.” She still feels violated by him. For weeks her mind wasn’t completely her own, and even if this isn’t the same, the scars of what he did to her still linger in her mind...and on her body.

Stiles sits down at her vanity facing her, his knee jiggling up and down in an obvious display of nervous energy. “But he’s not now?”

“No.” Lydia sighs. “But tonight I woke up screaming and ended up finding a dead body. That can’t be a coincidence.” Her eyes bore into his across her room. She thinks maybe if she looks hard enough she’ll be able to see into his mind and use his knowledge to somehow solve this for herself.

Stiles nods thoughtfully. “Maybe you’re not just immune, maybe you’re something else and the immunity is just a byproduct of that.”

Lydia recoils slightly. She doesn’t want to be _something_ , she just wants to be normal. Her voice holds a note of fear when she asks, “Something like what?”

“I don’t know. This is new territory for me.” The corners of his mouth lift somewhat in an attempt to reassure her that he doesn’t mean it in a bad way, and it puts her more at ease even though she’s still worried. Stiles’ phone buzzes in his pocket. Once he’s finished studying the message his expression turns regretful. “Look, I have to go. But we’ll look into this more, I promise.”

It’s not the first time he’s promised her something, but it might be the first time she really believes him. Lydia nods profusely, trying her hardest to slip back into her usual thorny exterior but she’s tired and it feels faker than it usually does. “Okay. Thanks for coming tonight.”

Stiles stands and slips his phone back into his pocket. “It’s not a problem. Just call me if anything else happens.”

Lydia can’t resist rolling her eyes. “Yes, I’ll be sure to call you if I run into any more dead bodies.”

He lets out a humorless chuckle and moves to stand in front of her. “No, but like, anything. Anything you might need to talk about, anything weird. I might be able to help, you know? You can call me whenever you need to.”

Lydia looks up into his eyes and she’s taken aback by how sincere he appears. They’re not just empty words. She thinks that this might be what it’s like to be friends with Stiles. He wants to help and she dislikes that that feels like an alien concept to her, somebody wanting to help her selflessly, but it is. “...Okay.”

Stiles briefly rests his hand on her shoulder and it feels different from the times he’s touched her before. He doesn’t feel like that goofy boy with a crush on her anymore. He feels like someone that matters a little bit to her. Lydia continues to sit there at the end of her bed for a long time after he leaves. She feels confused about whatever is going on, but there’s also something that feels settled within her because she knows now that there are people fighting in her corner alongside her.

\--

Lydia wakes up to her phone buzzing incessantly on her nightstand. With a tired groan, she covers her head with her pillow and prays it’ll stop. She breathes a sigh of relief as it ends, but then two seconds later it starts up again and she growls in frustration as she’s forced into dealing with the problem. Lydia sits up in bed and brings the phone to her ear, answering it without looking at who’s calling her.

“So, the body you found?”

_Stiles_. Of course. And not even a good morning or an apology for waking her up. “Yes?”

“Wasn’t killed by Boyd and Cora. More likely...a human sacrifice.” His fast pace slows a little at that last part, and Lydia can hear the undercurrent of worry in his voice. _Human sacrifices? Have they those to contend with now as well?_

“What?” Lydia brings her other hand to her forehead and tips forward into it, the last dregs of sleep still sticking to her consciousness.

“And apparently targeting virgins.” Stiles’ voice gets higher in pitch and a little strangled, despite the fact that he’s supposedly just sharing information with her he sounds like he’s panicking. _Oh_. _Virgins_.

“Oh,” Lydia vocalizes.

“Socially outdated, I know. I mean who cares about virgin or non-virgin anymore. No one’s blood is any purer than anyone else’s just because they haven’t engaged in intercourse. It’s fabricated bullshit.” Stiles starts talking a mile a minute again, and it would make Lydia laugh if it wasn’t such a serious situation.

“Stiles,” Lydia says sternly to cut off his rambling.

He breathes out harshly. “What?”

“Calm down,” she urges in a tone she hopes is reassuring.

Stiles scoffs. “I am calm? I’m completely calm. I mean, we don’t know who’s going around killing people. They’re not supernatural wounds so we’re at square one regarding who it could be.” She can practically see him pacing up and down like he was doing in her room last night. “Oh, and a girl I knew since I was in diapers was one of the sacrifices. Yeah, I’m totally calm.”

Lydia winces, remembering back to the night she and Allison found Scott and Stiles outside of a party. The girl he was going to hook up with most likely. “I’m sorry. That you lost a friend.”

“Yeah, it sucks. She was really sweet. Died on her birthday. Died a virgin too, she would’ve hated that.” Stiles’ words are flippant on the surface, but she can sense the bitterness is covering up for how sad he is, it’s a technique she’s all too familiar with.

“Stiles.”

“Sorry, sarcasm is the only thing getting me through right now. I might be freaking out,” he admits. She pauses for a moment, giving him the chance get his bearings.

“Understandable. Why’d you call me?” Lydia’s voice gets quiet and more serious because she’s genuinely curious. They’re not exactly on each other’s speed dials, they don’t usually sit around and debrief each other about the suspicious activity of Beacon Hills. Or they didn’t use to. Maybe they do now.

“I just...wanted to fill you in,” he begins, somewhat unsure. “I feel bad about all the crap we kept from you last year. I want you to know what’s going on so you can be prepared.” It makes her smile, and it’s a continuation of the feeling she had after he left last night. All of this supernatural crap might be scary and infuriating, but facing it with people beside her is so much better than facing it alone.

“Well, I’m not a virgin, so no need to warn me there.” Lydia curls her lips around her teeth to suppress her laughter.

Stiles makes a choked off noise in the back of his throat like her comment threw him and he coughs to clear it before mustering a response. “Uh, yeah. But we don’t know what we’re dealing with. They might change tactics. Plus you’re really smart, the more information you have the better chance we all have of surviving.” Stiles’ tone becomes lighter and more teasing, but she can tell he genuinely believes that, and it makes confidence bloom in her chest.

“I’ll agree with you on that. But just...don’t worry about it so much.” She’s specifically referring to the virginity part because she doesn’t believe Stiles is destined to die due to his lack of sexual experience.

“No?” he questions.

Lydia nods even though he can’t see her. “Obviously it’s bad. Whoever’s doing it needs to be stopped. But the reason you’re freaking out? Don’t. I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

“Easy for you to say,” Stiles mutters.

She conceals another laugh. “You’re surrounded by werewolves, Stiles. They’ll protect you.”

“I don’t want to die for a reason as stupid as this, you know?” She does. And she secretly likes that he’s opening up to her and how honest this conversation feels.

“You won’t,” she insists. “Bye, Stiles.”

“Yeah, thanks for indulging me. Bye, Lydia.” He hangs up and Lydia notices that it’s 8 A.M. on Saturday morning. She rolls her eyes at Stiles’ lack of consideration for her much-needed beauty sleep considering the trauma of the night before and sinks back down into her bed. If there’s a smile on her face as she drifts off again, it’s definitely not because of Stiles Stilinski.

\--

Stiles watches his best friend sleeping peacefully against the window of the bus. He kind of doesn’t want to take his eyes off him after what happened tonight. It feels like a raw wound; the fact that his best friend, his _brother_ , came so close to ending his own life terrifies him. Their lives have been in near constant turmoil and movement since the day Scott was bitten, and they’ve struggled and even lost people along the way, but it’s not all been bad. Maybe he needs to remind Scott of that more. His eyes sweep slowly over the rest of the bus, cloaked in darkness, and they widen when they connect with Lydia’s, the redhead watching him steadily with rapt attention.

“Hey, you okay?” he asks.

“You almost died. Both of you,” Lydia says soberly, her fingers clenching the soft material of the bus seat beside her, and it creates a clenching in his chest that makes his breath falter a little.

“Didn’t though.” Stiles’ mouth ticks up in an almost-smile as his eyes soften. “Thanks to you.”

Her gaze drifts upwards to the ceiling of the bus, scanning the superficial cracks. Stiles is captivated by her beauty, but that’s not irregular. It feels different though— like he’s seeing her in a new light, seeing the hero she has the potential to be.

“I...I’ve never done anything like that before.”

“How did it feel?” he asks in a low voice. Stiles continues to watch her even though she’s looked away from him. There was a time he would be terrified of Lydia catching him looking at her, but he knows she’s not going to bite his head off now. It strikes him how small she looks in the moonlight of the bus, how fragile she is, but she risked her life to save them anyway. He can’t help but be proud of her. She’s fit into their little dysfunctional group so seamlessly that he can barely remember what it was like without her in it. And he likes her in it. He thinks she was always meant to be here.

“Scary,” Lydia admits honestly before turning her eyes towards him again, “but good.” She’s smiling, and there’s a lightness to her voice when she says that. He can see something inside of her has changed, it’s mesmerizing and he just can’t look away.

They sit on opposite sides of the bus, just watching each other for a while, relishing in the security and simmering adrenaline. The girl he’s been in love with since he was eight years old just saved him and his best friend. That’s not something he’s going to get over anytime soon.

“I saw something.”

“Hm?” Stiles makes a questioning face as he refocuses.

“In the flames. There was a figure. A monster,” she clarifies.

“The Darach?”

Lydia nods. “I think so.”

“You outsmarted him, Lydia. You didn’t just save me and Scott. You saved Boyd, Isaac, even Ethan really. You figured all of this out.” He reaches out his hand tentatively, but before he can second-guess himself he lays it solidly over the top of the hand she has rested on the bus seat. She doesn’t move away, so he assumes it’s welcomed.

“We both did,” she insists. He swears he can feel her hand twitch underneath his a little like she might want to turn it around to hold his hand back, but then he thinks he’s probably imagining it.

Allison stirs a little in her sleep from the seat in front of Lydia’s, shocking him into retracting his hand and bringing it back over to his side of the bus. The realization that their dozing best friends are surrounding them causes him to whisper more when he says, “Hey, you should try to sleep. It’s been a long night.”

“You should too,” she responds vehemently, at a quieter decibel than before.

Stiles’ can’t resist rolling his eyes. “My experience with sleep is more of a ‘wait ‘til I pass out’ kind of thing. Plus somebody needs to keep watch.”

Lydia shakes her head in discouragement. “Try anyway. I don’t think anything else is going to happen tonight.”

“Is that your expert opinion?”

She smiles back at him, eyes soft. “Call it a hunch.”

“Well I know better than to doubt Lydia Martin,” he quips before shuffling down more into the uncomfortable bus seat and Lydia does the same but with much more finesse. He snoozes for a few minutes before awakening again and when he looks over at Lydia, he finds her sleeping peacefully. It occurs to him that she could easily be mistaken for a fairytale princess who wandered into the wrong genre. It shouldn’t work, but it sure makes for an interesting story.

\--

Derek’s loft feels freezing cold and it’s not just because it’s drenched in cold water. Lydia can physically feel the bitter chill emanating from the atmosphere, a consequence of the life that was just taken. Boyd’s life. Which was done by the guy she’s been hooking up with. It feels like there’s a rock sinking down into the pit of her stomach and she can’t help but wonder if she could’ve done more to stop this from happening.

After a while, Stiles walks up to her and simply declares, “Come on, I’ll drive you home.” He seems weary, and it makes her want to comfort him and tell him he did everything he could but the words get caught in her throat. Lydia nods and follows him back down to the jeep. A few days ago they saved Boyd from killing himself. And now he’s been killed for nothing more than a power trip by a pack of alphas that treat ending a life like a candle being snuffed out. Like it’s meaningless. _Easy_.

“I could feel that something bad was going to happen.” Lydia breaks the tense silence as Stiles drives through Beacon Hills, the streetlights are the only light being emitted in a sea of darkness.

“I know.”

Lydia watches him as he stares at the road ahead. “I don’t know what’s going on with me, Stiles. I don’t know how I’m supposed to help.” She hates not knowing. All her life she’s worked around the clock to know as much as she possibly can about everything, but there’s no book she can read to help her learn this, and it hurts because people are dying and what if she has the ability to do something about it?

“I’m sorry.” He sounds so earnest and it makes her breath pause.

Lydia twiddles her fingers where they lay in her lap. “For what?”

She lifts her head discreetly to observe him and she watches Stiles’ face, remorseful and stressed as his mind whirrs behind his eyes. “That we haven’t figured it out yet. And for pushing you today.”

Lydia shakes her head. She doesn’t want him to blame himself for this, he’s the last person she would put the blame on. “No, it’s okay. You were trying to save people.”

The jeep falls into silence, tension bubbling between them that makes Lydia feel uneasy as she gets pulled into ugly thoughts of alpha packs and dead teenagers. Darachs. Voices she shouldn’t be able to hear.

“Can I ask you something?” It feels like his voice physically cracks the silence like an eggshell smashing. He sounds apprehensive— like he’s worried about crossing a line with her in their newfound friendship.

Her body is hunched and closed-off, which isn’t exactly welcoming, so she can understand why Stiles seems unsure of her response. “Sure.”

“What are you going to do about Aiden?” It’s the first time he’s ever brought up Aiden to her and it makes her uncomfortable, it feels like she’s been caught out in some way, even though it’s really none of Stiles’ business. She’s tried to keep whatever’s going on with Aiden entirely separate from her friends, even going so far as to lie to them about him, but Lydia knows that was an impossibility considering he’s literally the enemy.

Lydia turns her gaze to the window to stop herself from seeing Stiles’ expression, for some reason she doesn’t want to be able to read his face. “I don’t...I can’t be involved with someone that would do this. He killed Boyd.”

“He did,” he agrees simply.

“It’s not like Jackson, I can’t forgive this. He knew what he was doing. He did it deliberately.” The more she explains her feelings the more she hates Aiden for doing this. Even if they’re not together, and he doesn’t owe her anything, she’s automatically associated with him and his actions. There is a boy whose blood is running cold tonight because of the boy she’s been fucking. He didn’t do it alone, but he was a willing participant.

“Yeah,” Stiles says pensively.

Lydia suddenly feels defensive against his monosyllabic responses. It feels like judgment, in a way. He’s always so wordy—  he could probably break a world record for most words spoken in a minute— yet now he’s almost mute? “Were you expecting a different reaction?” she asks harshly.

The car accelerates abruptly, and she thinks she actually scared Stiles into him pushing his foot harder against the pedal before he recovers. “No no no. I just...wanted to know where your head was at.”

“Whether I was morally bankrupt or not?” Lydia doesn’t know why she’s attacking him or why her voice is taking on a viper-like quality, but it feels necessary in some way— like she has to be protective. It’s not a protectiveness over Aiden or his actions, but of herself. She _hates_ what he’s done, but there’s nothing she can do about it.

“You know I don’t think that,” he responds softly, not rising to the argument.

Lydia yanks the headband off her head, feeling constricted, and if her hair becomes a mess she really doesn’t care right now. “Cora was right though. I don’t have good taste in guys.”

Stiles brings the car to a stop outside her house and looks over at her for the first time since they left Derek’s loft. His eyes are intense and somber when they connect with hers. “I’m not going to be the one to criticize your choices, Lydia.”

She hates that she almost wants him to. His opinion _means_ something to her now, and sometimes she gets lost between the Old Lydia and the New Lydia. The Old Lydia was selfish and shallow, and whilst she doesn’t want anyone to tell her what to do, she thinks maybe she needs that sometimes. Her parents never cared if she did anything morally wrong, in fact, they seemed to expect it of her. Nobody thought she could be better until Allison. And then followed Scott and Stiles.

“Then why bring it up in the first place?”

“Because I care about you,” he insists earnestly, and she sees his fingers twitch against the steering wheel like he wants to reach out to her but won’t let himself. “I don’t want to see you get hurt.”

Every time he says that, it makes her heart’s rhythm alter slightly because it feels so all-encompassing. She doesn’t know what she’s done to deserve somebody caring about her like Stiles seems to so naturally. It’s without any discernible reason. “ _I’m_ not the one getting hurt,” she refutes loudly but it feels like a lie. And there’s an unspoken ‘yet’ lingering in the air between them. Lydia feels the sudden urge to run away from this enclosed space with him. “Um. Thank you for the ride home.”

“No problem,” he replies emptily, but she’s already out the car door and slamming it closed behind her, marching up to her house as fast as her heels will allow her.

\--

Stiles feels like everything is moving in slow motion. One moment he’s rushing to catch up to Scott after hearing Lydia’s scream, the next he’s staring at a smashed window in the classroom where his dad has been kidnapped by the Darach. Their English teacher is the Darach. His dad is going to be a sacrifice. Stiles feels like he’s choking, and he only comes back to reality when he hears Scott’s voice saying Lydia’s name over and over.

“Hey, shh shh. Don't try to talk okay?” Scott hurriedly un-tapes her hands from the chair. Lydia winces and nods. Her body sags from relief and the tear tracks on her face shine hauntingly in the moonlight. Scott brings a hand up to her cheek, studying the wound on her temple. Lydia’s terrified eyes flit between Scott and Stiles, slightly dazed and full of panic. 

An urgent voice echoes out in the hallway, “Lydia? Lydia, are you here?”

Scott leaps up from the floor and rushes out into the hallway. Stiles hears the words: “Allison, we’re in here. She's hurt.”

Stiles feels incapable of forming words and wouldn’t know what to say to her if he did, so he steps forward and grabs hold of Lydia’s hand. She grips back tightly, small wheezing gasps escaping her throat. His mind is going a thousand miles a minute, worried about Lydia, worried about his dad, worried about what Ms. Blake is about to do next. He takes solace in the way they hold onto each other, it’s the only thing that stops him trembling uncontrollably because he needs her touch right now. And she needs his. It’s a brief moment of comfort as they try to pull each other out of the wreckage. She’s like a liferaft keeping him afloat.

When Scott comes back into the room with Allison in tow, Stiles lets go of her and moves behind the chair as they crouch in front of her to assess the damage. They’re more composed in a crisis than he is. He feels colder without her immediately, but he’s not the priority here.

Scott looks at her head wound again and then studies the marks around her neck, touching her tenderly to make sure he doesn’t hurt her further. “I think you'll be okay, it just looks like some pretty bad bruising. But she hit you on the head too, you definitely need medical attention.”

Allison takes Lydia’s hand in hers reassuringly. “The piano player was killed, somebody will have already called an ambulance. We can get them to take a look at her.”

Scott nods and stands up. “Okay, you’re gonna be fine Lydia. I promise.”

“Scott,” Stiles begins, his voice thick with pent-up emotion as he tries to hold back the fearful tears that have been burning behind his eyes ever since the Darach closed the door in his face, blocking him off from the three most important people in his life. “We need to go to Derek’s, she’ll be going to him first to try and manipulate him.”

Stiles approaches Scott, and his best friend puts a hand on his shoulder in an attempt to comfort him. “Yeah, you're right, we should go.” Scott looks down to address Allison, “Can you take care of her?”

Allison rubs her hand up and down Lydia’s arm soothingly. “Of course.”

“B-Banshee,” Lydia chokes out raspily.

Stiles’ focus narrows in on Lydia like he’s looking down a telescope lens and she’s in the center of the reticle. “What?” Stiles asks, his brow furrowing.

Scott shushes her tenderly. “Lydia, don't talk. Don't hurt yourself.”

Lydia shakes her head urgently, her eyes wide and insistent as she tries to get the words out. She’s talking directly to him like she knows he’s the one who’ll understand what she’s talking about. “Sh-she c-called me a ba-banshee.”

Stiles’ mind races for a moment. _Banshee_. It seems so obvious now that Lydia’s a banshee. He can’t believe they didn’t piece it together before but with everything else going on the focus on Lydia’s abilities had taken a backseat and it shouldn’t have because this was easy to solve. The screaming, the discovery of dead bodies, the way she’d been able to predict death. Lydia’s not a frightening hag, not by a long shot. But every mythological creature has truths and falsities to it.

“Well that explains a lot,” Stiles replies, bringing a hand up to rub across his weary face.

“It does?” Scott asks in a confused voice as he turns to look at Stiles.

He shakes his head despondently. “We’ll go over it later. We gotta go.” Stiles looks down at Lydia and nods at her meaningfully, understanding why she had to tell them something that could be important, something that the Darach could be using to her advantage. He tries to give her a reassuring smile, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. He thinks back to the chessboard, and he doesn’t know how to arrange the pieces in order to beat Ms. Blake, but he has to figure it out as soon as he can. She _can’t_ win.

\--

There’s a steady knock at the front door, and Lydia tells her mom that she’ll get it because she knows it’s Stiles. He’d been texting her for most of the morning and offered to drive her to school. Lydia realizes she’s come to recognize his knock. She blinks for a second as she stands in front of the closed door and pauses, wondering when she’d learned what his knock sounded like. Three short taps in quick succession, twice over— like he’s saying ‘Ly-di-ah. Ly-di-ah.’ with his knuckles.

He only knocks when he comes to see her alone, almost as if he wants her to know it’s only him on the other side of the door. Lydia doesn’t know when Stiles began to represent security to her, but the very nature of him being across that threshold makes her feel safer than she has in ages. She doesn’t even have to see him, just knowing he’s there makes a difference.

When she pulls the door open, she’s greeted by a gentle if strained smile, a sense of relief crossing his face as his eyes scan her to assess the injuries of the night before and sees that she’s still in one piece. “Hey, how are you feeling?”

Lydia’s face softens. “Better.” Her hand instinctively comes up to trace the mark on her throat. The one she decided she doesn’t want to hide. It makes her feel naked. Vulnerable in a way that she hasn’t felt since she was literally found wandering the woods without any clothes on. She’s still trying to grasp the fact that she doesn’t have to be perfect. She’ll never be perfect again and no amount of makeup is going to hide that. She’s a banshee— whatever that entails. She’s different now.

“Your neck looks like it might disagree,” Stiles argues lightly, but there’s concern behind his eyes. He looks tired— like he hasn’t slept at all. Lydia presses her body against the side of the door, the lock digging into her stomach slightly. It might look like she’s hiding but really she just wants to stay in the safety of her house for a little bit longer. There are no Darachs, no Alpha packs, and no sacrifices here. She feels the need to preserve that safety for a few moments longer before they have to dive back in.

Stiles steps through her doorway and even though there’s space— so much space— his body brushes against Lydia’s as he passes her. It’s fleeting. Brief. But it prompts a slow, simmering warmth under her skin like someone might feel from a mug of hot chocolate on a cold winter’s day, the temperature setting a body alight like a slow burning candle. He looks down at her momentarily as he passes, as if he’s trying to figure out if she’s really okay or not. And the events of the previous night suddenly come flooding back to Lydia—  his dad was taken by Ms. Blake. She needs to know how she can help.

“It’s fine, honestly. No lasting damage,” Lydia reassures him as she walks away from the entrance, Stiles’ footsteps echoing behind her as he follows. “Any closer to finding your dad? What’s the plan?”

“Not one I agree with,” he answers with a vague eye-roll filled with irritation.

Lydia’s brow furrows in confusion as she sits down in the family room, waiting for an explanation.

“So while you were out of commission last night...well, let’s just say a lot of shit went down at the hospital. It culminated in Ms. Blake taking Scott’s mom,” Lydia inhales, “and Scott leaving with Deucalion.”

\--

Stiles leans against the metal table in Deaton’s office, hunched over with his elbows resting against the cold surface. Lydia wanders over to stand next to him and rests her palm tentatively across his back, she can practically feel the tension in his muscles, sharp and intense as if he could shatter at any moment. He runs a hand across his weary face and lifts his head closer towards her. “Hey, sorry I indirectly sent you to Peter. I wasn’t thinking.”

Lydia frowns and shakes her head, rebutting his unnecessary apology. “No, Stiles, I wanted to help. It’s inconsequential compared to what’s happening right now.”

“It’s not though,” he murmurs, anguish barely repressed in his voice. He’s taking on too much, and she’s _worried_. “I know the last place you want to be is anywhere near him after what he did to you.”

She hates that he’s beating himself up over this when his dad’s life is hanging in the balance. She doesn’t matter right now, she _doesn’t_. “It’s about saving your dad. Scott’s mom. Allison’s dad. I can handle it,” she insists.

“Yeah, but you shouldn’t have to,” he replies, standing taller and resting his palms on the table, arms locked stiffly. He stares down at the metal surface as the cold seeps into his skin.

Lydia’s hand falls away from his back and she turns to rest her body against the table beside him, the edge of it cutting into the small of her back as she faces the tiny windows. “There’s a lot of things we shouldn’t have to do,” she says wistfully.

Stiles pauses for a moment, the silence deafening before he inhales raggedly. He taps his fingers against the metal. “Or want to do,” he adds weightily.

Her spine stiffens, a chilling feeling sweeping over her entire body. _No no no_ , she thinks. She knows he’s referring to the kiss and that’s not how she feels. She knows that’s not how she feels. “No...no that’s not what I meant,” Lydia swears softly, but Stiles’ attention has already drifted to Deaton entering the room. The conversation is forgotten in favor of listening to the inevitable plan the veterinarian has concocted. Lydia’s heart sinks, her mind a swirling mess of feelings that she doesn’t even know how to begin to sort through.

\--

“They’re going to be okay, right?” Lydia asks before bringing her thumb up to her mouth, teeth worrying at the skin beside her nail anxiously. She hasn't bitten her nails in _years_ , but she doesn't have any other outlet for the immense worry that is twisting and turning her stomach into knots.

Isaac scoffs. “Yeah, you know, hours in freezing water hanging between life and death. I’m sure they’ll be great.”

“Isaac,” she chastises, looking over at him sternly.

“You know as well as I do that the results of this probably won’t be good. Deaton said even if it works they’ll come back changed.” Isaac is pessimism personified, not that Lydia can blame him. After all the people he's lost and all the crap he's been through, she can understand it.

“Can you be a little optimistic?”

“Can you be a little realistic?” he retorts.

Lydia crosses one leg over the other, a knowing expression on her face. “I know you care about her. About Scott. About everyone. Pretending you don’t doesn’t fool me.”

Isaac leans forward, rests his elbows on his knees and smirks. “Oh, because you’re a paradigm of showing emotion, aren’t you Lydia? I’m sure Deaton chose you for Stiles for no reason at all.”

She flinches and crosses her arms over her chest defensively. Lydia’s gaze moves back towards the ice baths in front of them, and she feels an icy cold twinge down her spine. “Well between the three of us I made the most sense, didn’t I? He wouldn’t come back for you.”

Isaac chuckles sardonically. “But he’d certainly come back for you.”

Her traitorous heart skips a beat. Lydia can’t help but remember the way Stiles’ eyes shone with wonder when she’d finally dragged her lips away from his— how they looked golden bathed in the glowing sunlight of the locker room. She remembers the way he’d said so quietly, ‘ _That was really smart_ ’ and how it made her cheeks burn while her heartbeat raced and raced and _raced_. She remembers the way Stiles looked at her shyly but with need when Deaton told her to go with him. “I didn’t say that,” Lydia refutes uneasily, closing her eyes.

“But you know it’s true.” Isaac’s words make the hair on the back of her neck stand up.

“Will you just shut up?” she snaps.

Isaac just continues smirking and it makes Lydia want to punch him, werewolf be damned. “Got under your skin, didn’t he?”

Lydia refuses to respond to Isaac’s shrewd commentary, even if he may be right. So she chooses offense rather than defense. “How do you think Scott will feel now that you’re developing feelings for the love of his life?” Her mouth twists into an evil smile as Isaac’s face drops briefly.

“Touché.”

\--

She has her head in her hand, body slumped over in the worst posture of her life when the sound of the door clicking open makes her straighten up slightly, blinking the drowsiness out of her eyes. “Lydia, are you sure you’re okay? You look exhausted,” Deaton says as he hands her a cup of coffee.

Lydia wipes her fingers under her eyes tiredly, smudging her make up a little in the process. “It’s been a long time,” she answers worriedly, the warmth from the cup seeping into her skin and coursing up through her arm. It’s been so long just sitting here waiting for them to emerge from whatever mental plain they’re on, and Lydia’s spent most of it lost in thought, watching them for any changes.

“You could go through to the waiting area and sleep on the couch,” he suggests, nodding his head towards the front of the building. She trusts Deaton, and she’d be perfectly fine with leaving him and Isaac to hold down the fort, but Lydia knows she wouldn’t get any sleep with Allison, Scott, and Stiles still stuck in a state of limbo. “I’d wake you if there were any changes,” he adds.

Lydia shakes her head, taking a long sip of the coffee. It's bitter— stronger than she'd usually drink— but it serves its purpose. “I don’t want to leave them.”

“I understand.”

Her gaze drifts back over to the ice baths, specifically Stiles’. Since she’d sat down, it has felt like there is an invisible string pulling her back towards him. Lydia can feel energy flowing through her body, and even though she doesn’t know what kind of power comes with being a banshee, she knows that she has certain _instincts_. The instincts that told her that something was undoubtedly wrong in the motel, that took her to Beacon Hills pool to find a dead body, that rolled around inside her on the way to Derek’s loft when Boyd was killed. The same instincts that tell her to keep her eyes glued to Stiles’ ice bath, because maybe he’s not going to die but he’s still in _danger_. Lydia feels like she’s standing on the edge of a cliff and if she loses her footing it’s all over, she’s going to get dragged down with him into the abyss.

“Why has it been so long?”

Deaton looks over at the teenagers calmly. “It’s not an exact science. We just have to wait for them.”

She’s never been patient, and the concept of waiting for an undeterminable amount of time causes her to subconsciously clench her fist and her nails to dig into her palm until the pain brings her back to focus. Lydia rubs her hand against the fabric of her dress in an attempt to diffuse the ache but then all she can think about is the soft skin of Stiles’ cheeks against her hands as she tried to calm him down. She wants him back. She wants them all back. And she wants them safe. “Will it be worse the longer they’re under?”

“I don’t think so. It’s the process of being between life and death, not how long they’re there for.” Deaton answers.

“We’re running out of time,” Lydia says fearfully, glancing over at the clock ticking away on the wall. What would happen if they don’t come back in time for the eclipse? If they made these sacrifices and their parents die anyway? How will they bear it if they brought this darkness upon themselves for _nothing_?

\--

Lydia hears Stiles’ voice carry through the clinic and leaves Aiden’s side, wandering out to meet him at the entrance. Scott nods at her and smiles as he walks past her to check on the twins, and she smiles back, pleased that they’ve all managed to make it out alive somehow. As Lydia approaches Stiles, her smile falls and her eyes narrow as she spots the wound on Stiles’ head, her hand automatically coming up to brush against his skin tenderly. “What did you do to yourself?”

“Oh. Um…” Stiles stutters, a cheerful smile on his lips as his forehead creases, remembering the injury and wincing slightly when the movement of his brow clearly causes it throb angrily, “I crashed my jeep on the way to the Nemeton?” His voice lilts in a mixture of airiness and sheepish guilt.

“Stiles,” Lydia scolds, concern etched on her face as she lets her hand fall away. The sheer number of things that could’ve and almost did go wrong during the climax of the fight against the Darach gives her a headache. “I didn’t drown you and bring you back just for you to be reckless with your life, you know. I can’t have my hard work going to waste,” she ridicules.  

He rocks up and down on his toes as he looks down at her with a sparkle in his eyes. “I apologize,” he replies in jest. “It’s fine. Mrs. McCall already had a look at it, she said it’s all good.”

Lydia tuts at him. “Of all the things we face on a daily basis...”

Stiles laughs, and it makes Lydia grin. She can’t remember the last time she heard him laugh, it’s felt like too long. And then she can’t place when she started to notice his laugh but she has and it’s wonderful and Lydia needs to push it away and shove it down before she falls into patterns that will only cause her more trouble. It was one kiss. One kiss to help stop his panic attack. It doesn’t have to mean anything.

“Yeah, note to self, don’t drive if you can’t see the road in front of you.” He rolls his eyes good-naturedly.

“Well, I’m glad everything worked out okay,” Lydia smirks, “I hear you got there just in time.”

Stiles smiles softly, nodding as his eyes lock with hers. “Yep. Think I’m sticking with the aluminum bat from now on.”

Lydia rolls her eyes and pats him gently on the shoulder. “Of course you are,” she teases, smashing her lips together to hide her smile as she leaves the room. _It doesn’t have to mean anything._

\--

Allison stirs awake and the first thing she sees when she opens her eyes is Lydia smirking, straight red hair framing her face like the licking flames of a campfire as she looks down at the homework in her lap. She narrows her eyes and asks, “What?”

“Good dream?” Lydia teases as she stops writing, her gaze meeting Allison’s. Her best friend looks smug, and that doesn’t bode well for her, that she knows.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” Allison asks with trepidation, grabbing a forgotten glass on her nightstand and taking a long sip of tepid water.

“You said something in your sleep,” Lydia sing-songs gloatingly.

“I did?” She asks whilst dipping her index finger into the water and flicking a drop or two over at Lydia who yelps and brings her notepad up, ducking behind it. Allison grins in satisfaction.

When she considers it safe to drop her paper shield, she replies, “Isaac’s name.” Lydia pokes the tip of her pen into Allison’s leg for emphasis.

Allison groans, flashes of her dream coming back to her. Isaac’s shirtless torso, his curly hair, those soft eyes. It’s not the first dream she’s had about him, it’s been a frequent occurrence since they started getting closer, even more so since the sacrificing ritual, but she hadn’t told Lydia about the dreams yet.  “Crap.”

Lydia’s mouth ticks up gently. “There’s no reason to keep anything from me, Allison. Best friend duty. You can tell me anything and I will tell nobody.” Her eyebrows raise humorously, and Allison loves her but she can really be a pain in the ass sometimes.

“I’m attracted to him,” Allison admits, resting her forehead on her fist as she watches Lydia enjoy this way too much.

“Clearly,” Lydia replies, her eyes widening with emphasis. She obviously wants Allison to elaborate.

Allison shakes her head good-naturedly. “But he lives with Scott. He's _friends_ with Scott.” That’s only part of the issue. She’s not even sure she’s really over Scott, it’s incredibly confusing. Their relationship is strikingly different to how it was when they were together last year, they’ve been apart for a long time and she wonders if there’s too much water under the bridge. The connection that they’d had is still there, but there’s a growing connection with Isaac as well, and that one is at the front of her mind. She broke up with Scott for so many reasons, and a lack of love wasn’t one of them, but the werewolf part kind of was. It would be hypocritical of her to move on with yet another werewolf, not that she even really knows if she wants to yet. Dreams are just dreams, they don’t have to amount to anything.

“And there lies the issue,” Lydia clarifies, looking back down at her work again. She holds the tip of her pen in the corner of her mouth as she ponders the next question for a moment. Leave it to Lydia to try and simplify a dilemma about boys.

“Among others, yeah,” Allison thinks aloud.

“You're only young once. I say let it happen.” Lydia fills in an answer and taps her pen twice on Allison’s leg lightly. She’s like a metaphorical devil on her shoulder, pushing her to pursue things without obsessing over them beforehand.

“Like you're letting it happen with Aiden,” she assumes. She knows Lydia started seeing him again after they were almost killed on the night of the eclipse. But she’s not sure whether Lydia’s feelings have grown for the former alpha twin or if Aiden is the only one besotted.

“I like him, sure. But it's casual. He's a good distraction.” Lydia subconsciously curls strands of her hair around her finger, pulling it taught.

Allison frowns, considering Lydia’s choice of words and her rare nervous habit of teasing her hair.  “Why do you still need a distraction? You said you were over Jackson.”

Lydia’s body freezes, almost like she’s embodied a Grecian statue. “Oh.”

She narrows her eyes at her caught-out best friend. “Lydia?” Allison questions, leaning forward to rest her chin on Lydia’s knee, her eyes looking up at her in what she hopes is a welcoming expression, eager to hear what’s going on with the redhead.

“The best friend secrecy goes both ways right?” Allison doesn’t think she’s ever seen Lydia shy before and irks her a little that there are still parts of her that she doesn’t know after all this time. This must be something Lydia _really_ doesn’t want to admit.

“Lydia, who on earth would I tell your secrets to?” Allison laughs. It’s true, Lydia is her only female friend, and it’s not like she’s going to be going around gossiping to Scott or Isaac or even Stiles.

“Good point,” Lydia replies, and pauses for a moment, biting down on her bottom lip before confessing, “something happened.”

“Something like?”

Lydia falls back onto the bed, her hair fanning out around her on Allison’s comforter. “When Jennifer took the guardians, and your dad was taken, I was with Stiles.” She stares up at the ceiling as she recounts the day, her eyes glazing over a little as she remembers something that’s clearly quite important. “He had a panic attack.”

“...Okay,” Allison murmurs, waiting for her to continue.

Lydia bends one knee, the toes of her foot wiggling as she fidgets against the bedspread. “I may have...kissed him.” She finally glances back at Allison, looking uncertain of her reaction. “As a spur of the moment thing to make him hold his breath and break him out of it,” she adds, the tenor of her voice an indication that she’s simply relaying a logical progression of the facts. Lydia’s attempt at being aloof doesn’t fool her.

Allison blinks rapidly as she thinks about the new information and tries to refrain from screaming ‘ _Finally!_ ’ in Lydia’s face. Instead, she grabs Lydia’s hand and drags her back into a sitting position so she can talk to her properly. “You kissed Stiles,” she reaffirms.

“To stop a panic attack.”

“You kissed Stiles.”

“To make him hold his breath!”

“You. Kissed. Stiles.”

“...Yes,” Lydia replies sheepishly.

“How was it?” Allison hunches her spine, bending forward with rapt interest.

Lydia’s eyes flick down to the bedspread, her eyes inspecting a loose thread between her fingertips as the smallest of smiles curves over her mouth. “...Unexpected?”

Allison laughs, kicking back onto the bed as she rests her head on her hand supported by her elbow. “Back to the original point. You said Aiden was a _distraction_ .” Allison watches Lydia’s cheeks grow redder, the blush burning all the way down to her neck and Allison feels positively giddy. Screw her own romantic entanglements; she’s been waiting for this ever since Scott told her about Stiles’ crush in the early days of their romance. She’s always thought he and Lydia would make an incredible pair if Lydia would just _see_ him. And now it appears that she has. Even if she tells herself it was because of a panic attack, she wouldn’t have ever considered pressing her lips against the boy’s if she wasn’t somewhat attracted to him deep down. Deep _deep_ down. This is her best friend, after all.

Lydia, visibly trying to ignore her heated skin, shakes a finger at Allison playfully. “No comment.”

“Lydia,” Allison argues, all joking aside for a moment.

“I said no comment,” she repeats, narrowing her eyes threateningly.

Allison sighs, her tone more serious now. “You’re not on trial here. Do you have feelings for him?”

“I don't know,” Lydia whispers, as if the quieter she is, the less likely it is that anyone will know she’d said it.

“But you must have felt something,” Allison tries, prying for more. She knows she’s treading a thin line, that Lydia is right on the precipice of shutting this conversation down if it gets too close to her heart.

“Maybe.”

“You're scared,” Allison realizes, considering her best friend’s reaction critically. Allison knows Lydia—  nothing about a boy scares her unless there are feelings involved. She knows that by now. This could be something real. _Holy crap_ , she wants to see Stiles’ face when this comes to fruition. She needs to have a camera on standby.

Lydia picks up her homework again, pressing her pen a little too hard this time. “I'm avoiding it until it goes away.”

“And if it doesn't?” Allison suggests. It won’t. She knows feelings, and she knows that Lydia’s not going to stop falling now that she’s started.

“Go back to your sex dream Allison.” Lydia snarks, picking up a pillow and throwing it at Allison’s head and she can’t help but cackle in amusement at Lydia’s avoidance of the issue at hand. Allison enjoys Lydia being flustered over the gangling dorky boy that can certainly keep up with the redhead better than any of them intellectually. _Someday,_ she thinks. _Someday_.

\--

What Lydia doesn’t expect is that after her conversation with Allison, even though she didn’t technically admit to anything, her mind takes the idea and runs with it. The floodgates open, so to speak.

She’ll be sitting in class and her gaze will focus on Stiles, at his desk in front of her. The teacher’s monotonous words become a blur as Lydia’s eyes trace over the curve of his neck, the slope of his shoulders, his spine shifting as he fidgets in order to talk to Scott. It damn near terrifies her, how distracting this boy has become for her. She bites her lip and thinks of how his mouth felt pressed against hers. When Aiden touches the skin on her back, she thinks of Stiles’ hand guiding her in times of crisis, sure and comforting. When he laughs with his whole body, her breath gets caught in her throat and she has to remember how to breathe. _In. Out._

Lydia tries to keep all of this locked tightly in a little box in her mind, shut away so she can ignore it until it dissipates. It will. She’s _certain_ it will. After all, she’s got Aiden to take her sexual frustration out on, and that’s all it is— sexual frustration. She swears it.

Except one morning, she wakes up clutching her pillow fiercely and resting her forehead against it as her knees dig into the mattress. Her breathing harsh and heavy. She feels needy and wanting as flashes of her dream come back to her in the soft light of the morning. Lydia almost feels Stiles’ lips on her neck, and can’t restrain the way her head is thrown back, her messy hair cascading behind her and hitting her spine. That sparks a vision of Stiles’ mouth hot and wet as he places kisses across her back, paying attention to each vertebra as he goes. She feels a shudder through her whole body as beads of sweat form along her temple, her brow furrowing as her eyes clench shut, desperate to hold onto the fragments of her dream. _In. Out._

Arousal flares inside her as she sees a flash of him reaching the dip of her back and sucking a bruising kiss into the place where she’s felt his soft touch so many times over the last few months and it makes her lose her breath. It’s like he’s branding her— like his name is written on her skin. It feels so real that Lydia can _almost_ believe it is. _In. Out._

The mirage of the boy with kind eyes inside her fantasy runs his fingertips tenderly along the length of her thighs, pressing firmly into her flesh in a way that makes her dizzy. Even though she’s kneeling on her bed the world feels off its axis. She feels unearthed, soaring to heights she didn’t know she could reach. Lydia can’t repress the guttural groan that escapes her lips as her head falls forward. She feels like she’s burning all over, desperate for it not to be a dream. She wants Stiles here and now, making these fantasies a reality. _In. Out._

Lydia grips the pillow in her hand even tighter and slides the other one down her body and under the waistband of her sleep shorts to run her fingers through the wetness she finds there. As she touches herself, it hits Lydia that she’s never been this turned on in her _life_ and it’s because of _Stiles_. It feels like a turning point— like Lydia won’t be able to convince herself that there’s nothing there if she comes with his name on her lips. But she needs release so badly that stopping just isn’t an option. Knowing it’s because of Stiles feels illicit— like she shouldn’t be getting off on the dream-infused images of someone that’s become a good friend to her since the start of junior year.

She tries to imagine what Stiles’ fingers would feel like. Bigger than hers. Longer. _Dexterous_ . More focused and probably at a better angle too but Lydia can’t _think_. She can only _feel_. She bites her lip as the air puffs out from her lungs ragged and frustrated as she clings to the memories of the dream. Unattainable, trembling pleasure that is so _so_ close. Just out of reach. _In. Out._

Lydia throws her head back again as she arches her spine at the intense sensation coursing through her body. Behind her closed eyes, all she can see is Stiles’ concentrated face in class as he chews on the end of a pen, his tongue curling around it in a manner that shouldn’t be erotic but totally is. What would it feel like if his tongue explored _her_? He talks _so much._ How would it feel to just push him down between her thighs and let him use his oral fixation to her benefit? If he was lying beneath her body, how hard would she come from riding his face? _How many times?_ It pushes her over the edge. Lydia buries her head into her pillow with force as she all but screams her climax into it whilst her body thrashes involuntarily as every nerve ending is electrified.

She collapses onto her side and tries to catch her breath. Her hips continue twitching with aftershocks and she clenches her thighs together, enhancing the sensitivity at her core. _In. Out._

Lydia gradually becomes more aware of her surroundings and notices her phone buzzing on the nightstand. She blows her mussed hair out of her face and reaches for it, not looking at the caller ID before she answers.

“Finally!” Stiles’ voice is like a bucket of cold water being poured over her as she tries to disguise any signs of how she’s been spending her morning.

“H-hey, what can I do you for? I mean, do for you. What can I do for you?” Lydia has to urge to smack herself in the forehead, she’s never fumbled over her words like that with Stiles before.

She can hear the confusion in his voice when he asks, “Are you okay? You sound...odd.”

“I’m fine. I just finished working out,” she lies. It seems like the safest option to disguise the raspy and breathy qualities inflected in her tone. _In. Out._

“Oh right, that's why you didn’t respond to my texts.”

“I didn’t have my phone with me. What did you need?” She sucks her lip between her teeth, trying to ignore the way just hearing his voice is making her feel riled up again.

“I was asking if you wanted to get coffee this morning.” He sounds happy, and it makes her heart soar in response. She tries to ignore it. It’s one thing to admit to herself that she’s sexually attracted to him, it’s a different thing entirely to let herself feel beyond that.

Lydia looks over at her clock which reads quarter to nine and asks, “What time?”

“Ten-thirty good for you?”

Lydia’s hand subconsciously drifts down her body again, toying with the drawstring absent-mindedly. Her eyes widen when she realizes what she’s doing, and she places her palm flat against the mattress. “That’s fine. See you then.”

“Bye Lydia,” he signs-off.

She stares at the phone in contemplation for a while after he hangs up before tossing it to the side. _Fuck it_ , she brings her hands to the sides of her shorts and pushes them down her body, throwing them into her laundry hamper across the room. She’s astounded by the fact that she’s still so turned on just from hearing his voice on the phone and thinking about seeing him later when she worked so hard to satiate her desire already.

When sparks explode behind her eyes and her vision goes white, it’s Stiles she sees as the fog clears.

_In. Out._

/

“Are you...glowing?” Stiles asks with amusement as Lydia flounces into the coffee shop and sits beside him at his table.

Lydia rolls her eyes, trying to stop the blush from getting worse as it stains her cheeks. “I told you I was working out this morning.”

Stiles raises an eyebrow with intrigue like he doesn’t quite believe her. “Cardio was it?”

“And yoga,” she supplies, biting her lip a little. She rests her elbow on the table as she looks into his eyes, a half-assed attempt at selling the lie.

He gulps and chuckles, shaking his head. “If everyone looked like you do after working out I think we’d have a much more accomplished lacrosse team.”

Lydia cocks an eyebrow. “I _assume_ that's a compliment?”

“Of the highest caliber, Lydia, yes,” he responds with ease. It makes something flutter in her stomach. Stiles complimenting her isn’t rare exactly, but he presents it so matter-of-factly like it’s undeniable. A known truth of the universe. And for the first time, it knocks the air out of her lungs, settles deep into her bones and makes the tips of her toes feel numb. “I'll get you your coffee.”

“Skinny mocha,” she tells him.

Stiles rolls his eyes. “I know. What do you take me for? An amateur?”

_Not in my dreams at least,_ she thinks. Lydia shakes her head, determined to jolt herself out of this mood because if she lets it continue she’ll most certainly slip up in some way, and she can’t allow herself to do that. And If Lydia _does_ spend the rest of their coffee date staring at Stiles’ lips as he talks, it’s not her fault. She blames it on teenage hormones.

Just to be safe, Lydia picks up her phone and texts Aiden to meet her that evening. She’ll focus her sexual frustration elsewhere. _Not_ on Stiles Stilinski.  

\--

The hand on her thigh moves higher under her skirt to grab her ass and Lydia arches up into the body above her, fisting her hand in the back of his t-shirt.

“Lydia, you weren't responding to my calls or texts, are you...Oh.”

And then it’s like a bucket of ice-water has been poured over her as Stiles walks into her bedroom unannounced. Lydia rips her mouth away from Aiden’s, her eyes connecting with Stiles’ wide-eyed gaze. She studies his face, the ruddy complexion of his cheeks and his mouth agape in shock. He shakes himself out of his stupor. “Shit, sorry. I'll just...I'll just go.” Stiles begins to back out of the room.

“Stiles just...wait outside my door for a minute, alright?” Lydia asks softly, placing a hand on Aiden’s chest, ready to push him away. Stiles nods profusely, his gaze averted as he closes the door behind him. “I'll see you later?” she says to Aiden, removing his hand from under her skirt.

Aiden scoffs and glares down at her beneath him, nostrils flaring angrily. “Are you serious? Just tell him to leave.”

Lydia’s expression hardens, conveying no room for negotiation. “Aiden, go. I'll talk to you later,” she insists.

“Whatever,” he mutters, rolling his eyes as he lifts himself off her with a huff. He rips the door open angrily and it almost surprises her that he doesn’t pull it off its hinges. She sees him glare at Stiles as he leaves.

Lydia waits until she hears the front door slam and winces. She pulls herself off of her bed and attempts to fix her skirt, running her hands along the fabric in an attempt to smoothen the creases from where it’s been hiked up. She chances a quick glance in her mirror, sighing when she realizes there’s no way to make herself appropriately presentable. “Okay, you can come in now.”

Stiles slides his phone into his pocket as he enters her room again, face returned to more or less his usual shade, derived of red blush and slack-jawed shock. “Sorry,” he apologizes. “Didn't realize you were seeing him again. I wouldn't have intruded.” When his eyes scan Lydia’s crumpled form in front of him, some of the color returns to his cheeks again and Lydia glances down to see if there’s anything more she can fix only to realize that her bra has been pushed askew during the make-out session and her breasts are spilling out over-the-top of the cups almost obscenely, a few of the buttons on her blouse are undone, adding to her debauched look. Lydia closes her eyes, ready for the ground to swallow her up.

“Yeah well, they're trying to be better. Since Jennifer,” she reasons, but it sounds like a flimsy excuse. Not that she actually needs one. What she does with her body is none of Stiles’ business.

“Right,” Stiles responds awkwardly.

Something occurs to Lydia, and she frowns in confusion. “Do you have a key to my house?”

Caught out, Stiles immediately looks apologetic. “Oh. Uh...yeah, sorry. Not just yours!” he insists. “I kind of have a key to everything in case something happens. Scott’s, the station, the clinic…”

“And my house.”

Stiles pulls the keys out of his pocket and waves them at her clumsily. “Yeah, the only one I don't have is for the Argent’s because, frankly, Allison’s dad scares the shit out of me.” He frowns. “And Allison scares the shit out of me.”

Lydia chuckles, fixing a few strands of hair that she can feel are out of place. “Of course.”

“Do you...do you want it back?” Stiles asks anxiously, worrying his lip between his teeth and a thrum goes through Lydia’s body. He looks so earnest, trying his hardest not to stare at her body even though she’s standing right in front of him, clothes askew, hair a mess, and body buzzing with unsatiated arousal. Her attraction to him isn’t subsiding even though she does have Aiden. Not to mention, her priorities clearly lie elsewhere considering she just kicked out her lover in favor of a conversation with a boy that doesn’t seem to be really going anywhere. She could’ve easily told Stiles to leave, that she would’ve called him later and continued her tryst with Aiden, but she didn’t. In fact, if Stiles made a move on her right now, Lydia knows she'd be helpless to resist. But that's wrong. Stiles is her friend— is becoming one of her best friends, and she can't allow the way her body responds to him to cloud her judgment.

“No, I think you should keep it. Just in case.” Lydia tells him. It feels like she’s taking a leap, indicative of a commitment to him as part of her life. “I trust you. But no more walking in unannounced. There are boundaries.”

Stiles nods and purses his lips. “Yeah, I’d rather not see that again if we’re being honest.” He rubs his hand against the back of his neck awkwardly and Lydia smashes her lips together, trying to conceal the smile from escaping. She brings her fist up to cover her mouth and Stiles’ eyes trace upwards from her legs to her head slower than a friend’s should. When his eyes lock with hers, Lydia chuckles slightly into her hand at the absurdity of the situation.

“Did you need anything in particular?” Lydia asks as she sits down on the edge of her bed and crosses one leg over the over. Now that he’s let his eyes linger, Lydia can’t help but tease him just a little bit.

Just as she expects, Stiles’ eyes are drawn to her thighs and he stares for a moment before shaking his head and averting his gaze. “Yeah. No...no, it’s fine. Nothing I can’t handle by myself.” Lydia has to repress the urge to laugh out loud at the accidental double entendre. “Oh my god,” he mutters, “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

Stiles, red-faced, shakes his head once again before turning and striding out of the room. Lydia laughs loudly as soon as he exits and she hears a responding shout of, “Stop that!” as his footsteps thump down the stairs.

It brings her more satisfaction than Aiden ever could have.

\--

“Making fun of you came back to bite me in the ass, didn’t it?” Lydia blurts as soon as Stiles picks up her call. She kicks her heels off and flops down onto her bed, her body bouncing until the momentum dies and she stills.

“I don’t think karma is at play here Lydia,” Stiles quips, but there’s a lack of humor in his voice, he sounds tired.

Lydia sighs, her mind whirring with what’s happening to Allison, Scott, and Stiles in conjunction with Kira’s explanation of progressive states and wrathful deities. It sets her nerves on edge like she’s waiting for the other shoe to drop and someone to actually get hurt or worse— killed. “It’s not impossible though.”

“Are you okay?”

Lydia’s eyes screw shut as she winces, her mouth twisting uncomfortably as she remembers the arrow rushing towards her face at breakneck speed. “I just keep seeing it over and over again...wondering what would’ve happened if Isaac hadn’t been there...”

“Do you want me to come over?” There’s urgency building in his voice. She can hear jangling in the background, and Lydia rolls her eyes.

“Stiles, put your keys down. I’m fine. There’s no emergency. Everyone’s okay,” she urges, trying to ease the worry radiating off of him. But Lydia feels like she can still sense him fretting on the other end of the line, so she adds with conviction, “I promise.”

“Are you sure?” he asks tensely. It makes Lydia’s concern for him grow, this is more anxiety than he usually displays, so openly at least. “It doesn’t _have_ to be an emergency,” Stiles adds caringly. And she knows that, she knows he’s somebody she can rely on when she needs to, she just hopes she can be the same for him.

Lydia twirls a strand of her hair around and around her finger, feeling it constrict the blood flow slightly before she releases it. “Yes, I'm sure. Are _you_ okay?”

“Why wouldn't I be okay? They’re just _dreams_. Your best friend nearly killed you and you're asking me if I'm okay? I've been there, I know how it feels. Fuck, Lydia, this isn't about me.” He says all of this rapidly, the words tumbling and stringing together with barely a breath between sentences. It does nothing to dissuade Lydia from thinking there’s more to his reaction than he’s letting on. That he’s projecting and trying to submerge himself in her problems instead of focusing on what he’s going through. He hasn’t given her any details other than ‘sleep paralysis’.

“The gentleman doth protest too much, methinks.” She adds a small laugh to try and distract him.

“That's not the line,” he chides, but Lydia thinks she can sense his breathing slowing down a little.

“I adapted it to fit the purpose,” she says with a smile before the seriousness of his behavior gnaws at her again. “But really, are you okay? You've seemed more on edge than usual.” She realizes that gives away that she’s been paying more attention to him than she should be, but Lydia hopes Stiles doesn’t notice. “I can't help you if you don't tell me.”

Stiles sighs heavily. “Deaton says there's a door open in our minds.”

“A door?” Lydia freezes, her mind racing. Something about that seems familiar, Stiles and a door. It doesn’t make any sense, there’s no memory she has that fits that description, but it feels like something she should remember, something important, like a dream or a nightmare she had that’s just on the peripheral of her mind.

“Yeah. And we need to close it.”

Lydia scoffs. “He makes it sound awfully simple.”

“Yeah, he's infuriating like that.” He chuckles sardonically.

“What happens if you can't?”

“I don't know. Bad things probably.” Stiles pauses, and Lydia can imagine him running a hand through his hair in contemplation. “All that talk of bardo and demons and death...“

Lydia inhales sharply, fear taking hold of her as she tries to push away the worst possible outcomes. It’s one thing after another, it feels like they barely get any respite from the demons already, whether they be real or imaginary. They knew going into the sacrifice that bad things could happen, but it was such a desperate and urgent situation that they never really considered what the consequences could be. If they could be even worse.

They’re both quiet for a while, and Lydia’s just about to say her goodbyes and hang up when Stiles tentatively admits, “There’s something else.”

Her grip tightens around her phone. “What is it?”

“Sometimes...sometimes I can’t read,” he confesses anxiously, almost frightened. “The letters get all jumbled up in my head and I can’t _read_ , Lydia.”

Uneasiness settles in her gut. She and Stiles are researchers, the thought of not being able to peruse information for hours because the words no longer make any sense makes her brain hurt. “Stiles, if you ever need help with anything…”

“I know,” Stiles answers certainly, like he trusts her. They’ve barely said their goodbyes before Lydia is striding over to her computer and urgently typing into search engines looking for reasons behind a sudden incapability to read, but her efforts are fruitless. If this is a supernatural side effect, there’s very little chance medical analysis can aid her in helping him.

She falls asleep at her laptop anyways, though.

\--

Lydia sinks further into Stiles’ chest, his arms still wrapped around her waist from catching her when she jumped towards him. Her top has ridden up with her arms around his neck, and so Stiles’ hands run along the bare skin left exposed. She can feel how big they are as they cover her whole back. He can’t keep still and his palms rub back and forth against her body like he’s reassuring himself that she’s safe.

“Oh my god.”

“I know, I know,” he repeats, moving a hand up to stroke against the hair cascading down her back. She kind of doesn’t want to move right now, even though there are other issues to deal with. Lydia nearly lost her foot in an animal trap, and she would have done if Stiles hadn’t been there to help her out of it. It’s the simplest mortal danger she’s ever been up against. This wasn’t directly the cause of the supernatural even if they’re out here trying to change a coyote back into a girl.

“Thank you for that,” she says into his neck, her heated breath puffing out against the spot where his bare skin meets his t-shirt. She can smell the faint trace of sweat there from stress and running around in the woods and it’s comforting, in a way. It makes her feel grounded in reality even though his arms around her make Lydia feel like she’s floating. Her hand grips the collar of his hoodie tightly, not wanting to let go.

“Hey, I couldn’t have done it without you. The ego boost certainly helped.” Stiles laughs, his hands moving to her shoulders as he pulls away so that he can look at her.

Lydia shakes her head imperceptibly. “It wasn’t an ego boost, Stiles.” There are more words caught in her throat and on the tip of her tongue. She wants to explain what she truly thinks about him. That she considers him to be incredibly smart, that he has amazing intuition. When they’re working through a theory or a plan together it makes Lydia feel useful and serene, like it’s what she’s been meant to be doing all along. It gives her purpose. Every time they’re right about something, she wants to spend more and more time with him, absorbing his perceptivity and adding in her own intellect to help them reach conclusions faster. It makes something bloom in her chest, like a spring flower that’s being tended to every time he looks at her with pride or gratitude.

He rubs his hands against her shoulders comfortingly and she can feel the warmth of his skin through her thin burgundy crop top. “We should head back to the cars,” Stiles says, breaking Lydia out of her thoughts. She nods and finally lets go of his hoodie, taking a step forward into the leaves tentatively. Stiles puts his hand on her back, gently guiding her as he studies the ground beneath them so they don’t fall into any more traps. In a way though, Lydia feels like she’s already been caught.

\--

Lydia invites the group, consisting of herself, Allison, Scott, Stiles, and Isaac, up to her lake house for the weekend. It’s a small enough crowd that none of their parents seem too worried about them being without parental supervision. Lydia’s mother has been letting her come up to the lake house alone since she got her license, and with two werewolves and a hunter around the likeliness of danger befalling them isn’t too much of a concern for the Sheriff, Mrs. McCall or Mr. Argent. She thinks they actually like the idea of their kids getting to be normal for a weekend. The lake house is always at its prettiest in the fall, and it would seem a waste for her to come up here by herself, not to mention bonding time with her friends without the threat of danger isn’t something they get too much of.

She walks softly and leisurely out of the rear screen doors, having spotted Stiles sat on the wooden walkway leading up to the lake. He looks relaxed as he takes a sip of the drink in his mug, a cocktail of spiced rum and hot apple cider that she made for them all with Allison’s assistance. His head tilts towards her as he hears her quiet footsteps approach, a gentle smile gracing his face as she sits beside him.

“This drink is so delicious it’s going to get me in trouble.”

Lydia takes a sip of her own, relishing the warmth as it trickles down her throat. “Can’t hold your liquor, Stilinski?”

“Oh, absolutely not!” he replies with a grin, and moves his glass mug towards hers, she responds by clinking her drink with his, an amused smile curving across her lips. “The last time I really got drunk was last year, and that’s the story of how we discovered werewolves aren’t affected by alcohol.”

She nudges her shoulder against his deliberately. “Something tells me there’s more to that story than you’re willing to share.”

“Well, obviously,” he states, surreptitiously avoiding her eyes as he takes a swig of the concoction. “If you think I suffer from verbal diarrhea now, well… too much alcohol takes it to a whole new level.”

“Intriguing,” she says, watching him as he looks out across the lake. She’s been doing this more and more lately, staring at him when he’s not looking. She can’t help herself. He makes her lose control of her carefully crafted resolve. The way the light illuminates his features makes something inside her just… _yearn_.

Stiles shakes his head a little. “Embarrassing, more like.” He turns his gaze back to her, resting his chin on his shoulder. Lydia thinks if she just took that leap, leaned forward just a little, that their lips would brush ever so softly. She’s lost count of the number of times she’s considered it since the first time it happened, what it could be like without the urgency of a panic attack fueling it, what it would be like to take her time with him. The thought makes butterflies flutter around in her stomach. What she’s feeling for this boy terrifies her and leaves her shaking. Lydia physically shudders and Stiles blinks at her. “Cold?” he asks, putting his mug down beside him.

“A little,” she half-lies. Lydia doesn’t feel too cold due to the warmth of the cocktail coursing through her veins. However, the temperature isn’t at all the reason behind her trembling— he is.

He looks beside him and picks up a discarded blanket. Turning back towards her, he unfolds it and wraps it around her body carefully. “Better?” She nods, smiling at him in thanks and he offers her a similar one in return.

“Having fun?” she asks almost shyly.

“Absolutely. It’s beautiful up here. I appreciate the invitation, I know all too well how hard they are to come by.” Stiles winks at her and smiles into his mug, enjoying another mouthful of the warm liquid.

Lydia winces internally. She knows that wasn’t a dig, more than likely Stiles was just commenting on how far their relationship has evolved in such a short amount of time, but it still causes unrest in her bones to think about how she treated him in the past.  It makes her want to offer him a piece of her. Something personal that she hasn’t told anyone, not even Allison. He deserves it.

“This is my favorite place,” she shares.

“It is?” he asks with a smile, and a bright yellow leaf is carried by the wind and lands right on top of his head. Lydia giggles at the affronted look on his face and picks the leaf off of him, twirling it between her thumb and index finger.

“It was my grandmother’s, and I used to come up here all the time with her when I was little...before she got sick.” She holds the leaf up in front of her face and squints at Stiles through a small hole in it.

Stiles squints back at her through the leaf. “Memories are precious,” he says wistfully, and it makes tears prickle behind her eyes for a moment. For her grandmother, but for Stiles too. For the small boy who came to school one day with the light missing from his eyes, all of it buried in the ground with his mother. Nothing but memories left to preserve.

They sit together in a comfortable silence for a while, and Lydia has an overwhelming urge to rest her head on his shoulder and curl up beside him. She’s just about to give in to the desire for closeness when his voice startles her out of her thoughts.

“So how are things with Aiden?”

It’s like she’s been submerged in the lake, somebody pushing her head under the surface until her lungs burn while she kicks to try and get back to fresh air.

“Nonexistent. I haven’t spoken to him since he and Ethan decided to beat the crap out of Scott.” She’s barely given him a second thought. But the mention of her most recent lover bursts the sweet bubble she’d been in with Stiles. “How have things been with you? I know Allison isn’t having hallucinations anymore.”

“They’re okay. I’ve regained the ability to read, thankfully,” Stiles answers, but he avoids her eyes and Lydia thinks she’s learning to detect when he’s lying. Sometimes he’s good at selling it, but now is not one of those times.

“And the truth is?” she asks in a quiet but strong tone.

He turns his gaze towards her slowly and sighs heavily. “So maybe I’m having a little trouble sleeping.”

“A lot of trouble sleeping,” Lydia deduces, knowing he wouldn’t be bringing it up at all if it weren’t pretty bad. Stiles rolls his eyes and shrugs noncommittally and Lydia shakes her head disparagingly at him. “You think the peace and quiet out here could give you some temporary respite?”

“Maybe, yeah,” he agrees. A smirk slowly forms across his lips, a spark igniting in his eyes that makes heat prickle over the skin of her neck. She wraps the blanket around herself tighter so he doesn’t spot it. “Careful, Lydia. If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were worried about me.”

She scoffs. “I just don’t want to be woken up in the middle of the night by my banshee senses leading me to your dead body at the bottom of the lake because you sleep-walked yourself out here.”

“I don’t sleepwalk,” he refutes. He leans in closer to her and murmurs, “You can drop it down to a three.”

Lydia tilts her head cautiously. “And this scale is measuring?”

“Unnecessary concern. We’re here to have fun, aren’t we? Like normal teenagers?” There’s a degree of sarcasm when he says ‘normal teenagers’, because Lydia doesn’t remember the last time she felt normal, and it’s obviously been even longer for Stiles. Normalcy is not something attainable to them anymore, not while they’re living in Beacon Hills at least.

“Maybe normal is overrated,” she answers, eyes glinting up at him.

Stiles clicks his tongue facetiously. “Well, there’s not enough of us around to play spin the bottle…”

Lydia looks down and rubs her tongue along the inside of her bottom lip, instantly reminded of his mouth under hers and just how dangerous that game would be. She regains composure and looks up, eyes glancing towards the house and then back to Stiles as she notes, “Not to mention the love triangle we have in our vicinity…”

“Truth or dare? Never have I ever?” He's humorously pensive, searching for a ‘normal’ game for them to play. She almost suggests Seven Minutes in Heaven, a flash of her dragging Stiles into the foyer closet and having her way with him coursing through her mind.

“How about we all just settle down to watch a movie? Enjoy each other’s company, eat some s'mores....”

Stiles hums in pleasure at the mention of s'mores and pushes himself up, reaching a hand down to Lydia to help her to her feet. She places her hand in his and his fingers immediately wrap around her, enveloping her whole hand. It feels like safety, especially when he squeezes it a little as she stands.

“Lydia Martin, the homebody. Who knew?”

She pinches lightly at his waist in retaliation, a noise of protest in his throat. “I have my moments,” she answers as they walk back inside to a very loud argument over what movie they should watch.

\--

As they exit the Sheriff’s station, after Kira and Scott say their goodbyes and head over to his bike, Stiles and Lydia begin making their way to the jeep. The two of them are quiet but bursting  with adrenaline from the night’s sleuthing and saving.

Stiles’ keys jangle as he twirls them around his finger.  “You were amazing tonight, you know that? You saved Kira,” he breathes out before beaming at her.

Lydia grins back, the smile lighting up her face all the way up to her eyes, making them shine in the moonlight. “I was finally able to use my...powers...or whatever they are...to help someone.”

Stiles nudges his arm against hers jovially. “Yeah. You didn’t find a body, Lydia.”

They come to a slow stop next to the jeep. “I didn’t find a body,” she repeats happily.

He chuckles, looking down at her fondly. They spent most of the day together trying to figure things out. Sensing Barrow, trying to get everyone out of the school, researching, realizing the target was Kira. They work so well together that it makes Stiles want to pull her into his arms and spin her around, except that wouldn’t be appropriate. “I don't think I've ever seen you smile this much,” he says instead.

“It feels really good,” she murmurs, ducking her head as her cheeks pink up. Stiles thinks she’s been doing that more and more lately, looking bashful, and it’s such a contrast to the self-assured Lydia Martin who’d march down the school halls with such a purpose that the student body would part for her like Moses and the Red Sea. Maybe that was more of an act than he had thought it was; maybe Lydia truly has been enmeshed in a web of insecurities about her banshee abilities and their unknowable limits.

“Thank you,” she adds gently.

“For what?” Stiles asks, tilting his head curiously as he looks down at her, the echo of the empty lot outside of the Sheriff’s station amplifying every word they say in the quiet of the night.

“For listening to me, for…” Lydia pauses for a moment and looks up into his eyes, trying to convey what she means, what she doesn't seem to have the words for. She takes a step closer towards him, and Stiles thinks his heart actually stops for a moment before she rises up onto her toes and wraps her arms around him. “Just thank you,” she whispers into his ear, resting her chin on his shoulder.

Stiles blinks rapidly as his brain tries to catch up to what's happening. Lydia Martin is _hugging_ him. This has never happened before, not voluntarily, not with prior thought behind it. “You have nothing to thank me for,” he urges, wrapping his arms around her waist and squeezing her for emphasis. Stiles’ mind goes blissfully blank. He's not trying to unpack the meaning of this affection or freaking out over the girl he's been in love with for almost a decade actually being in his arms— he's just at peace. His brain grinds to a halt. There’s nothing but Lydia.

After a few more moments of lingering affection, Lydia sinks back down to her feet and pulls out of the hug. She does remain much closer to his body though, and he’s so aware of it. “Stiles, accept my gratitude.”

He rolls his eyes. “You’re welcome, Lydia.”

She swats him on the arm gently and raises her eyebrows. “Better. Now drive me home, it’s late and we have school tomorrow.”

“Got it,” he agrees. Stiles yanks the passenger door open and lifts an arm like a Victorian footman directing her into a carriage. Lydia’s laugh trills and seeps all the way into his bones, sending a warm sensation through his whole body. Everything about her is so beautiful. Any natural phenomenon in the world pales in comparison to the breathtaking radiance of Lydia Martin. Managing to immerse himself as part of her life, as someone she looks to for comfort, is perhaps one of his greatest achievements so far.

\--

“Hey, do you know where Stiles is? I texted him and he's not gotten back to me,” Lydia begins, a niggling feeling of worry in the back of her mind. Stiles isn't one to ignore her, and that in itself gives her reason to pause.

Scott hums in greeting. “Oh yeah, he was dealing with some stuff and didn't look too good so I told him to go home.”

“Really?” Lydia questions, pondering on why Stiles would so easily be convinced to take a break in amongst a new supernatural threat that's rendering each of them temporarily paralyzed and marking them with a mysterious symbol.

“Yeah. How are you by the way?” Scott asks, concern etched in his tone.

Lydia smiles softly at the alpha’s unnecessary worry. “Feeling better. Less like a popsicle more like a human being. Have those...things reappeared yet?”

“No, Argent thinks they come out at night. The twins are watching me like hawks,” he says in a mixture of surprise and confusion.

Lydia frowns. “They are?” Aiden did come to her rescue the night before at the party, but it's a whole new level for them to be trying to protect Scott.

“Yeah, apparently they really want to be part of the pack.”

“To benefit themselves, no doubt,” Lydia mutters in exasperation.

“Yeah, but they seem to be trying.” She can hear Scott’s gentle and hopeful smile through the phone. “Hey, my mom just texted me and she says she gave Stiles a tranquilizer at the hospital— diagnosed him with exhaustion.”

Lydia’s heart sinks. She wasn't aware his sleeping problems had gotten to such an extreme extent that he needed to be forced to rest with medication. “...I didn't know things were that bad.”

Scott sighs. “Yeah, me either. I'm a little worried, he had some bad theories earlier about what's going on with him.”

Lydia has the urge to ask Scott exactly what those theories entail, but there's also a part of her that really doesn't want to worry if he's just over-exaggerating because of the exhaustion. If Stiles wants her to know, he can tell her himself.

“Okay. Good luck with the demonic ninjas! And, yes, I'm aware of just how ridiculous that sentence sounds.” Scott’s hearty laugh rings in her ears long after she hangs up.

\--

Lydia’s head has been pounding almost constantly since leaving the hospital the night before. She doesn’t even know which sounds are real and amplified or whether they’re in her head anymore. It feels like her mind is closing in on itself and she can’t escape it no matter how hard she tries to push it away.

When Scott asks her if she wants to go to the hospital with him to see Stiles her heart physically aches. She thought she was finally getting somewhere with her powers, that they meant she could contribute towards saving people after what happened with Kira. But now it’s not even like she’s back to basics again, she just doesn’t believe the things she can do actually mean anything. Her abilities don’t make her important and they can’t help people. If she can’t even help find Stiles when he needed her to, what’s the point?

Before all of this, she was never the kind of person to drown in anxiety and despair, the air sucked from her lungs until she feels dizzy, but her mind doesn’t even feel like her own anymore. She can’t snap herself out of it even though she wants to. As she leaves the school and gets into her car, all she wants to do is run away from her problems, but that’s kind of impossible when the biggest problem is built into the fabric of her being. She curses the day Peter Hale bit her and woke up this once dormant part inside her. Life was simpler then. Her biggest worries were who she dated, whether she would be prom queen, getting into a good college— not life and death situations in which she can’t do _anything_ even when she should be able to.

Lydia drives on autopilot around Beacon Hills, music turned up to block out the sounds she really doesn’t want to hear. That clanging has been intermittently penetrating her skull since last night. She doesn’t know what it is. She doesn’t want to. Her phone buzzes away inside her bag, and she shouldn’t be able to hear it but _of course she can_. It’s probably Allison or Scott or Stiles, maybe even Aiden. All people who she’ll have to explain herself to and she can’t bear the thought of even speaking right now, of people worrying about her when she doesn’t deserve that worry. There is no escape from this torture. She replays last night over and over again. She tries to figure out where she went wrong. If there’s anyone she thinks she should be able to help, it’s Stiles. And that’s what hurts the most, what feels like the biggest failure. It’s not that she couldn’t help anybody, it’s that she couldn’t help _him_.

In order to keep the cage around her heart, she’ll lie to everyone. Most of the time she doesn’t even have to lie, just omit the truth and disguise her feelings and nobody will be any the wiser. The easiest thing to do is lie to herself, it makes it more believable when she does it to other people. The only person she told about the kiss was Allison, and even she chose not to push her on the topic. Lydia dreams about it sometimes, flashes and sparks of light swirling in her mind as she replays the feel of his lips on hers. How it felt completely different to any other kiss she’s shared with anybody else. That’s what terrifies her, what she doesn’t allow herself to unpack and figure out because if she does, it has the power to ruin her. In the striking reality of the day, away from her dreams of a kiss she can’t quite believe was real, in which life is so complicated and so messy, it’s just so much easier to coast along with Aiden and bury those other feelings deep deep down inside.

When Lydia puts the brake on and looks up, she realizes she’s ended up at the hospital anyway. That probably means something too, but it’s worthless. It doesn’t _help_. She turns her car off briefly before realizing the clanging noise just gets louder again, so back on it goes along with the music. It’s so uncomfortable, it feels like it’s ripping apart her mind. Lydia cranks the music higher and higher until the car is vibrating along to the bassline. It hurts so much that she can’t resist the scream that’s expelled from her lungs, the sharp pain burning through every nerve ending as it’s released. Something bad is happening. She knows that for sure.

\--

Lydia’s fingers are tapping away rhythmically at her laptop keys when Allison gets back to the Argent apartment, her movements echoing loudly in the silence. She’d chosen to spend the night there as sleep was an unattainable goal due to the worry coursing through her veins, and she didn’t want her mother asking questions as she studied the computer screen until her eyes went blurry.

Allison walks into her bedroom, stripping off her coat and laying it on a chair. “Hey, you been up all night?” she asks.

Lydia’s eyes flick away from the screen briefly towards Allison and then back to it. “Not quite.”

“So about as much sleep as I’ve had then,” Allison answers with a joyless smile as she climbs onto the bed behind Lydia and stares over her shoulder at her research.

“Pretty much.” Lydia lays back, resting her body against the brunette with a sigh. “How’s Isaac doing?”

Allison looks down and says with a soft shake of her head, “No change. But Scott took away his pain, so I hope he’ll start healing soon.”

She laces her fingers with Allison’s, squeezing her hand in sympathy. “I’m sorry, Allison.”

“Not your fault,” she says dejectedly.

“It’s not his either,” Lydia adds softly. Everything feels wrong. Stiles has been missing for days, there’s been no sign of him since the incident at the hospital. And they know, especially considering the way he desperately called out to people the night he was found in the coyote den, that if it was him, he would be contacting them. Which means Stiles isn’t Stiles anymore. He’s lost control and the Nogitsune has taken his place, planning god knows what.

Allison sighs. “I know that. I do.” She rubs her thumb against the back of Lydia’s hand, eyes scanning the array of books strewn out across her bed open on pages upon pages of research. “It’s just a little hard to ignore Isaac lying in the hospital, almost dead because he saved my life. Due to something Stiles did.”

“It’s not him,” Lydia reiterates firmly. She sucks her bottom lip between her teeth, biting down on the flesh as she looks back at the screen again.

“Something the thing controlling him did then.” Allison pushes some of the books away, not closing them in case they’re on important pages and it makes Lydia smile softly at the consideration. “Have you found anything?” she asks as she lays down beside her.

Lydia pushes some of her hair behind her ear and clicks over to her emails, showing Allison. “Deaton’s on his way back, he has a plan.” She lets Allison read the message and, when the brunette nods, Lydia switches back over to her lengthy document of collected information. “I’ve been researching all night. Kitsunes, possession, cures. I’m not sure I’m getting anywhere but it feels better to be doing something.”

Allison hums in agreement. “Have you texted him?”

“I don’t want to. If it’s not him…” Lydia shakes her head. The Nogitsune is a trickster. It knows how to talk to her and pretend it’s Stiles on the other end. She’s too scared to reach out, but living in limbo isn’t much better either.

“Yeah,” Allison agrees. “You heading to school?”

With a nod, Lydia closes her laptop and begins to get up from Allison’s soft bed. “I have to. I can’t sit around anymore. I’ve got to keep moving.” Lydia picks up each book one by one, folding over the corners to continue her research later. She stacks them in a pile on Allison’s desk, slipping just one on Japanese mythology into her bag to continue reading.

Tiredly, Allison pushes herself off her bed and wraps her arms around Lydia’s shoulders, pulling her into a firm hug. Lydia only allows herself a moment of ease in her best friend’s arms, her mind unable to shut off its constant flow of worry for very long. “Let me know if anything happens,” Allison utters, pressing a kiss into Lydia’s temple. “I’m gonna take a shower and sleep for a while.”

When Lydia sits down in her car she hunches over, body crumpling as her arms lie over the steering wheel. She has to make it stop, or she's going to break. So she takes all her worry for Stiles and locks it up in a corner of her mind. If she's needed, Scott will contact her. If Stiles needs her, well, she hopes he’ll be able to ask for her himself but after last time she's not sure how much use she can be. Lydia goes to school, and attempts to act normal…and then she sees Peter talking to her mom and normalcy goes completely out the window.

\--

“Hi,” Lydia greets as she knocks lightly on his bedroom door frame.

Stiles’ whole body judders like he's shaken out of his skin. “Oh... hey,” he replies wearily, running a hand over his pale face.

She steps inside tentatively, as if she's approaching a skittish wild animal. “I'm sorry, I didn't mean to startle you. Your father let me in.” She speaks quietly, not wanting to disrupt the stillness in Stiles’ bedroom. It strikes her how different things are now to the last time she uttered those words, even if they were only a few months ago.

He lets out a short and sardonic chuckle, completely devoid of any genuine humor. “It's fine. I just keep expecting somebody to show up and put me out of my misery.” His fingers toy with the material of his sweatpants, fidgeting anxiously.

“Nobody is doing that,” Lydia insists vehemently, taking a large step towards his bed. She feels like there's an invisible wall up between them, that he's lost somewhere and she can't reach him.

“They might want to consider it,” he says slowly, meeting her eyes for the first time since she’d entered the room.

Lydia stares back at him, watching his eyes soften for a moment as they communicate without words. She can see how close he is to truly giving up. “Scott told me what happened.”

He breaks his gaze away from her again and clenches his hands into fists, his knuckles turning dramatically white. “Right. Yeah.”

“How are you doing?” She tilts her head to the side in sympathy. Lydia’s whole body aches to move forward, to kneel down beside him and take his hands into hers, to support him. But as usual, her feet stay rooted to the spot.

“Honestly? Not good.” Stiles exhales shakily, the breath rattling through his chest. “I'm being possessed by an evil fox spirit. I’ve killed people. I stood in front of my best friend and twisted a sword through his body.” His eyes clench shut painfully, reliving the events in his mind.

Lydia shakes her head desperately. “It wasn’t you.”

“It feels like it was.” His mouth twists in a pained way that represents just how fragile everything is right now. Brittle. Frail. Weak.

A single tear slips from her eye. “It _wasn’t_ , Stiles.” She’s been repeating it over and over again to herself, to Allison, and now to him like a mantra. She _knows_ Stiles. She knows he would never want to hurt people like this, that it’s killing him. Lydia hates the Nogitsune with every fiber of her being for doing this to him.

He pauses for a few moments, the silence in the room deafening. “You shouldn’t be here,” he announces, his shoulders tensing before the rest of his body follows. Locking up and locking her out. 

Lydia inhales suddenly. “Oh.” She hurries to wipe the tear from her cheek before he sees it.

Stiles glances up at her again. “I don’t know when this stuff is going to wear off. I don’t want you around me,” he proclaims, his entire body positively itching to get her out.

“Stiles, we want to help you,” she tries again, her voice remaining measured and insistent.

“I don’t know if you can. If you figure out a way…” Stiles shrugs, apparently not knowing how to finish the sentence. “But until then, I want you as far away from me as possible.”

“How do you plan on enforcing that?” she questions bitterly, pushing her desperation away in favor of arguing back. She won't let him be a martyr. They are going to save him.

“I’m checking into Eichen House tonight.”

“You’re _what_?” Lydia challenges angrily.

He rises from the bed and meets her in the middle of the room, the light of the setting sun leaving them basked in a warm glow so different to the turbulent emotions exposed between them. It feels like when the light goes, so will he. “I don’t want to hurt people, Lydia. Every time I close my eyes, I see Scott’s face in agony, the officer bleeding out at the station, coach screaming in pain on the running trail...” Stiles’ voice gets louder, stabbing her with each word. He raises up to his full height and looks down at Lydia morosely. “I will _not_ add any more people to that list if I can help it.”

She knows he means her. And it makes her heart clench. She's reminded once again of that moment that seems like a lifetime ago when she stood in his room for the first time while he spewed words about how he’d feel devastated to be stood at her funeral. Lydia knows how that feels now. “So you’re protecting us, but who’s going to protect you?” she asks hollowly.

He shakes his head, nose crinkling in an almost-sneer. “It doesn’t matter.”

“It _does_.” She brings a hand up to his cheek but he flinches and pulls away from her quickly. It feels like she's been burned.

“Not as much.”

Lydia traces her eyes along his body, shrouded in baggy clothes, thinner than she's ever seen him. Barely hanging on. “We’ll figure out a way, Stiles. We always do.” She doesn't know when she got so optimistic. But she thinks it might have been when she realized she had something to lose.

Stiles chuckles brokenly. “I hope so.”

She puts her hands on her hips authoritatively. “Have you told Scott what you’re doing?”

“No.”

“I’m going to call him.”

Stiles pushes his lips together in silent frustration. “He’s not going to change my mind.”

Lydia’s tone softens slightly when she replies, “No, but he needs to know.”

“Fine.” His body sags tiredly.

Lydia has the urge to reach out and touch him again, to memorize the way his skin feels against hers, to reassure herself that it’s still Stiles standing before her— but he didn't respond to that well last time so she thinks better of it.

“Please look after yourself,” she asks as she turns around to leave. “Don't give up. We aren't.”

She closes the door behind her exiting body with a soft click. She hopes, god does she hope, that that's not the last time she's going to see Stiles Stilinski alive.

\--

Aiden picks up Stiles’ unconscious, broken body and lays him in the backseat. Lydia calls Scott via her car, his calm voice filling the speakers as the line connects and she drives quickly through Beacon Hills. “Scott, we found Stiles. He’s out cold right now. There’s...there’s a big gash on his stomach. What do we do?”

“Uh...I think...bring him to my place. I’ll call Deaton.”

Lydia looks at the street she’s on and urgently replies. “Okay. We should be there in ten.” She presses a button that ends the call and she can feel Aiden staring at her from the passenger seat, desperate to state his opinion. She waves a frustrated hand in his direction signaling his allowance to talk.

“I could kill him right now, Lydia,” he states coldly.

Lydia blinks rapidly. “ _No_.”

He leans closer towards her. “It would be over.”

“Aiden, no!” she snaps. “That is _not_ an option.” Her hands tighten around the wheel, knuckles turning paler and paler as her anger builds and builds.

“Why?”

Lydia grits her teeth and narrows her eyes as she stares at the road ahead. “If you have to ask, what are you doing trying to be part of this pack in the first place?”

She can see Aiden turning around to look at Stiles’ body and then back at her disparagingly. “It would save people, Lydia. He’s a killer. Saving people is supposed to be a _good_ thing.”

“You don’t get it,” Lydia emphasizes resolutely. Killing Stiles isn’t an option under any circumstances. Even if he asked them to do it himself, they wouldn’t. They fight and they fight and they fight to save their own. Lydia doesn’t want to live in a world without Stiles. She just doesn’t.

“No, I don’t get it,” he answers. “The way I see it, he’s a pathetic and irritating little asshole, and that’s when he’s not possessed by a demonic fox. I don’t know why you’re all breaking your backs to save someone like him.”

She always knew Aiden was a dick, but now she just wants to open up the passenger door and throw him out onto the street. ‘Someone like him’? Someone who told her to trust her instincts and not to doubt herself? Someone who had a panic attack because the mere thought of his dad being in danger destroyed him? Someone who would stand in a puddle of gasoline and tell his best friend that he would _die_ with him?

Lydia realizes that Aiden’s never going to change. He’s always going to put himself first and that’s something she refuses to do anymore. She cares about people too much to prioritize her own safety like that. Stiles is a good person. Good people are worth _saving_. “Shut up,” she snarls.

“I’m just saying…” he tries again.

She cuts him off, voice loud and chilling, “Well don’t! It’s not helpful.” She drives up to the McCall house and rushes out of the car, giving Aiden a stern look that leaves no room for argument, that he has to help her. The wound on Stiles’ stomach is huge and angry-looking, but it doesn’t look like it’s actively bleeding and Lydia doesn’t know if that’s supposed to be a good thing or a bad thing anymore.

\--

Stiles stumbles about while Scott and Peter reach forward to deal with the Nogitsune emerging from the bandages that erupt from Stiles’ mouth. Lydia’s head is still pounding from the after-effects of being stuck in his head and she subconsciously follows him as he makes his way out of the door of the McCall house. When he staggers forward, she instinctively reaches out to steady him, walking him over to her car.

“Lydia, I've gotta sit. I've gotta get out of here,” he murmurs under his breath urgently.

She nods and tips him into the passenger seat before quickly making her way around the car to get in herself.

And then everything shifts. It’s like the air is sucked out of her lungs.

He reaches over and wraps a hand tightly around the back of her neck, and she hasn’t felt so fragile since a man in a leather coat came at her with fangs drawn on the lacrosse field, the night her life changed forever. “Drive. Now.” His tone is sharp, authoritative, _threatening_. And he's locking the doors. This isn't Stiles. She's fallen into a trap of catastrophic consequences.

There's no time to think of a plan, she can't stall them. She has to do as he says and start the car.

“Don't worry, Lydia. We just left Stiles back at Scott’s house. He's alive— for now.” The Nogitsune is so smug, so arrogant, that she literally wants to kick herself for falling for the trick. Stiles wouldn't up and leave in the middle of a scene like that. He doesn’t leave until he knows everything happening in a situation is resolved. She can feel the blood rushing through her head, pounding rhythmically against her skull.

“I don't know what you want with me, but whatever it is I'm not going to give it to you,” she says in an attempt to be courageous as she tries to keep the fear out of her voice. She stares at the road ahead, unwilling to let her focus waver.

“Oh but Lydia, you will.” He sounds so sure, so nonchalant. “See, I've been in Stiles’ head for quite a while now, and I've seen _everything_. All of his memories. The information he has locked away in there about people.” The Nogitsune sounds so pleased when he tells her, “You’re going to prove extremely useful.” He’s practically snarling. Every word he utters sounds vindictive, almost venomous. “Make a left up here.”

She does as she’s told. Lydia knows she has to placate him and let him have his way until the pack can come up with a solution. It’s with startling clarity that Lydia realizes she can feel a sense of dread beginning to prickle beneath her skin. It’s the same feeling she had when they were on their way to Derek’s when Boyd was killed and similar to the feeling she got in the loft before the showdown with Jennifer. Something is going to happen because she was taken by the Nogitsune. She can feel it.

“I hope you know you can’t manipulate me, Lydia. I might be wearing his face, but you don’t have the same effect on me as you do on him.” She hates the sound of his voice. Lydia doesn’t want to listen to him. She doesn’t manipulate Stiles. Ever since they got closer, they’ve had a foundation of trust that they’ve built, a connection. They listen to each other. She doesn’t like hearing the Nogitsune trying to twist it into something sordid. She doesn’t want him talking about their relationship full stop.

Lydia replies calmly, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” She doesn’t want to give him anything. She’s still trying to process the fact that she’s been kidnapped by the thing that’s been ruining their lives for the last couple of weeks.

The Nogitsune leans towards her and scoffs. “Denial is such a fruitless action. You could at least make this vaguely interesting for me while we wait.”

“I have nothing to say to you,” she states. _Get through this, stay strong._

“Aww, come on now,” he teases. “I look just like him, you could even practice on me!” He brings a hand to her thigh and her blood runs cold. She starts trembling involuntarily and all she wants to do is _run run run_.

A tear slips out of her left eye. She tilts her head away from him slightly so he won’t see it. “You’re nothing like him. You’re _disgusting_ ,” she snarls.

“Now now, don’t make me angry. You won’t like me when I’m angry, Lydia.” The hand on her thigh changes tactics as his grip strengthens, his nails digging in painfully.

“You’re the one who told me to stop denying the truth.” She knows she should stop talking, that she’s just making it worse for herself. But Lydia’s words have always been her most striking weapon in cohesion with her intelligence— she’s similar to Stiles in that way.

“Such a spitfire,” he laughs sardonically. “Truthfully, I’d think you’d be too much for him. But then, you know as well as I do that there’s a darkness lurking inside him. It was already there, I wouldn’t have been able to get in if it wasn’t.” He removes his hand from her thigh, intent to continue riling her up with his words.

“You got in because he sacrificed himself to save his father.” All she can see is Stiles lying in that ice bath, out for sixteen hours while she sat there and waited for him to return to life. They would never have been able to predict this outcome. She wants life to be what it was but she’s not even sure what that means anymore. Erase the Darach, erase the Nogitsune, erase Peter and the kanima and the alpha pack and she has almost no connection to her friends at all. She had hated being in the dark. But she hates her life being threatened by a demonic trickster as well.

“Ah yes, the sacrifices. So young, the weight of the world on your shoulders,” he teases. And then sharper, “Stupid kids messing with things without even considering the consequences. I'm here because you awoke the Nemeton after all.” Lydia clenches her jaw in an attempt to keep her mouth shut. “What sacrifices have _you_ made?” he goads. It makes her want to cry. Because she hasn’t sacrificed anything, and he knows that. “Going silent on me? I was so enjoying a conversation with _the_ Lydia Martin.”

She's not quite sure she wants to delve into the meaning behind that one. Lydia knows Stiles has had feelings for her beyond friendship, but she doesn't want to be some mythical untouchable creature. She's just a girl— a girl who screams and finds dead bodies, but a girl nonetheless.

Lydia spots a ditch further up the road and she can feel the Nogitsune narrowing his eyes at her. His hand wraps around her neck again, “Don't even think about it. Keep driving where I tell you to or I'll slaughter everyone you love.”

Lydia can’t resist rolling her eyes even though she can feel the beginnings of a bruise forming on the back of her neck. “You're probably going to do that anyway.”

He moves closer still, and he reminds her of a hissing cobra, swaying back and forth threateningly. “Is it worth the risk to you, Lydia?” The Nogitsune nods to an opening up ahead, “Turn up here and park.” Doing what she’s told, Lydia stops the car and turns it off but before she can even think of a way to escape he closes his fingers tightly around hers. “I'll take those keys, thank you.”

She lets out a gasp of pain, the keys scratching against her palm as he rips them from her grasp. Lydia feels tears prickling up behind her eyes and before she can focus on trying to force them back and steeling herself so her emotions aren’t so on display, he wraps his hand around the front of her neck this time, forcing her back into the car seat with a whimper.

“I wonder what happens when everyone a banshee loves is tortured and murdered slowly. Do you think it’ll drive you insane? Do you think the power of your screams as their life drains away will kill you too?” Tears slip out of her eyes involuntarily, and she tries to close them to escape the horrifying look on his face, Stiles’ face, but all she can see is the people she loves dying in traumatic ways; she thinks she can even imagine the putrid smell of blood. “Maybe you’ll hear their dying screams so much you won't know which are theirs and which are yours? Do you want to find out?”

Lydia forces her eyes open, staring back into the Nogitsune’s gaze bravely. “No.”

He smiles wickedly, releasing his hand from around her neck slowly, finger by finger. “Yeah, I didn’t think so. Sit here, look pretty. It's time for the next part.”

He gets out and locks the doors with her keys. She feels frantic but frozen. This is a new car, there's not even any paper in here for her to leave a note. Lydia rushes through her memories trying to find something that will work. She knows for sure now, someone is going to die if they come and save her. She has to ride this one out alone. She shakes her head imperceptibly as something clicks in her mind. Allison told her that when she and Scott were dating secretly they would leave messages for each other in the condensation of her car window. If Allison searches for her, and she knows she will, this could save them.

Lydia looks around quickly, trying to spot the Nogitsune. His back is to her across the lot, he's readying another car. She breathes harshly on the window, her breath hot compared to the colder wind outside. She quickly writes ‘DONT FIND ME’ with her index finger, praying it's hidden before he comes back.

He doesn't spare a glance at the window when he returns, just unlocks the car and grabs Lydia roughly out of her seat.

“Now, Lydia, I can't have you knowing the way to where we’re going.” He turns her around so her front is pressed up against her car and pulls her hands behind her back, tying a rope around them to incapacitate her. “Or trying to escape,” he whispers it directly into her ear and it makes her shiver, she feels physically nauseous hearing Stiles’ voice with a completely different inflection. He brings a piece of fabric up to face, wrapping it around her head to blindfold her. “Nighty night,” he says saccharinely, and the words ‘Don't find me’ repeat over and over in her head as he leads her to the other car.

\--

It’s a foggy image, tinged with black smoke around the edges that coincides with the hazy feeling Stiles gets as he tries to look around. His head feels full— heavy like a stone sinking to the bottom of a murky lake— all he wants is the ability to see things clearly again. He doesn’t remember the last time his mind felt like his own. Stiles doesn’t know where they are or what’s happening, but as his vision focuses all he sees is the Nogitsune, with his own face, stood directly behind Lydia and her terrified expression. There are tears tracking down her cheeks and her eyes are locked with his, conveying so much despair he feels like he's choking on it.

The Nogitsune slowly wraps his hand around the front of Lydia’s throat and her eyes widen, profoundly desolate. As he watches her and she watches him, he can see the fox’s sadistic smirk in the corner of his vision. He’s rooted helplessly to the spot, utterly frozen and unable to move as he watches Lydia in the inevitable last few seconds of her life. Stiles’ heart hammers away inside of his chest, urging him to move, to save her because there’s nothing that’s more important than keeping Lydia safe. But his legs just won’t follow his instructions— it’s like being in quicksand. His eyes cloud with tears, the last thing he sees is her eyes close and then all he can hear is a guttural, broken scream. It pierces through him like a dagger to his heart.

He shoots awake on Scott’s sofa, his heart skipping beats as he regains cognizance. _It was just a dream. It was just a dream. Lydia’s not dead._ His mind utters those words over and over again as he tries to calm down while Scott runs into the room to check on him. There’s a part of him that wishes he’d ended it all in Eichen House per Morrell’s suggestion, but he knows realistically the fox was smart enough to do all of this even without using his body as the vessel of choice. All he can do now is try his best to stop it. To save everyone he can. If it costs him his life, so be it. He is bringing Lydia back.

\--

Stiles is pretty out of it, his body exhausted and hurting beyond belief, but he’s almost certain he can hear Lydia sobbing. It sounds like she’s really close, he thinks he can feel something pressing against his body, so maybe it’s her. But he can’t figure out why she’s crying, these constant broken noises only just penetrating the haze surrounding his mind. He doesn’t even have the strength to comfort her.

“Stiles. Stiles, you have to wake up.” It’s Argent’s voice, clear and commanding. He stirs, his eyes blinking open, his vision half-obscured by Lydia’s red curls. His mind slowly begins to wake up to the accompanying sounds of her distress. Something’s wrong. Lydia doesn’t like crying in front of people, he knows that.

His eyes flit up to Argent beside them, he has one hand on Lydia’s back and one on Stiles’ shoulder. _Oh god_ , he knows Argent. Argent isn’t physically comforting apart from when he’s with Allison. _Allison_ . “Please, tell me she’s not,” Stiles’ voice breaks as he says it. It can’t be true. _It can’t_. But then, of course Lydia’s sobbing, she would know, she would’ve felt it. His heart sinks so far down he thinks it’s going to literally drop out of his body.

He’s responsible for Allison’s death. He _killed_ Allison.

“I need to debrief Lydia, Isaac, and Scott on what to tell the police. Noshiko and Kira are going to take you to their house. Can you stand?” Argent speaks with an unmistakable clarity that Stiles can’t wrap his head around. His daughter just _died_. How is he doing this?

Stiles nods gently, one of his hands automatically lifting to rest on the back of Lydia’s head. “I need help though,” he murmurs. He feels shattered, his legs so weak they can’t support his weight without assistance anymore. Stiles thinks his body is probably colder than Allison’s is, and the very thought of that makes his stomach lurch with the impulse to vomit.

He moves his hand to Lydia’s arm as she leans back from his body. She releases a somber breath from her mouth, her whimpers finally subsiding. She takes a second to run her hands over her face like she’s trying to physically wipe away the sorrow and devastation. Argent takes her hand and assists her to her feet, locking eyes with her. Lydia looks back at him, eyes conveying a similar pain and she nods slightly dazed. Stiles looks up at them both helplessly as they have a silent conversation and he wishes it was him lying out there instead. They turn their attention back towards him and hold him by either arm, lifting him to his feet. He couldn’t feel less deserving of their attention as they bring him out to Noshiko and Kira at the front of the building.

He sees both Scott and Isaac, near catatonic with grief as they just stare into space, crumpled on the floor in their respective positions. Lydia stumbles, a small sob escaping her lips and Stiles’ vision settles on Allison. Her lifeless body is lying on the cold ground, blood on her lips and beneath her body, trickling out of her where he assumes the Oni stabbed her. She looks peaceful. Almost angelic. It rips through his body and he nearly falls to the ground. He will never, _ever_ be able to get that image out of his head.

Stiles loses a chunk of time after that, and the next thing he knows he’s in the back of Noshiko’s car, staring out of the window at the dark scenery of Beacon Hills. Their pack has been brutally destroyed in just one night. The Nogitsune has obliterated them. He’s ripped a spark out of the world. Stiles feels like he’s dying, and he thinks maybe that’s for the best so that everybody doesn’t have to look at him and see the face of the thing that’s responsible for killing a seventeen-year-old as special as Allison Argent. 

\--

Mrs. McCall and his dad insist on checking him into the hospital so she can ensure he makes a full recovery. His body is weak and exhausted, and Melissa’s aware of the fact that he struggles with insomnia with or without possession by a demonic fox, so he’s destined to spend the next couple of days hooked up to an IV to balance out his electrolytes and tranquilisers to regulate his sleeping pattern and get him back to a healthy norm. He’s not a fan of hospitals, but he relishes the opportunity to not have to come face to face with the myriad of people grieving over Allison and Aiden. He may not have physically killed them, but he’s going to carry their deaths on his conscience anyway. Stiles is pretty sure none of the pack are at school either, being given the week off on compassionate grounds, and it sends a shiver down his spine to think about it.

He hasn’t seen Lydia since she finally prised herself away from his arms after seeing Aiden’s dead body laid out on the ground, Ethan crying into it in grief. Another victim to add to his list, another person he took away from her. So when he’s woken from his light napping to the sounds of a hushed conversation outside his hospital room, the softly spoken voices of Scott’s mom and Lydia, he panics and chooses the cowards way out— he pretends to go back to sleep.

Lydia tentatively lets herself into Stiles’ room, and he squints ever so slightly, watching her grief-hardened face soften as she sees his body curled up peacefully in the bed. She tiptoes over to him, the afternoon sun lighting up the room in a warm golden hue. It’s so quiet you could hear a pin drop, and Lydia perches herself on the very edge of his bed, her eyes staring out of the window at the bright sunshine.

He keeps completely still, unwilling to alert her to his consciousness because looking into her mourning eyes will feel like a knife stabbing directly into his chest. After a few minutes, Lydia twists her body slightly so she’s looking directly down at the boy in the hospital bed beside her. He hears a shaky, watery breath and knows she’s crying, even if she’s restraining herself from making any noise. Lydia brings a hand up to his hairline, touch featherlight as her fingers brush against his forehead tenderly. He thinks his heart actually stops in his chest for several moments.

The cautious silence of the room is broken abruptly by the sound of a buzzing phone vibrating on the table beside his bed and his muscles tense. Lydia reaches for it quickly in order to stop it so it doesn’t wake Stiles, but he hears a faint ‘Oh’, and the phone is still going, quieter in her hand than it was against the wood of the table.

Suddenly the bed isn’t dipped anymore where she was perched, and Stiles hears Lydia’s heels as they clack softly against the hard floor and the click of the hospital room door as it closes behind her. His eyes spring open and he fumbles for his phone, turning the screen on to see ‘One missed call from Malia’.

\--

Methodically, and trying her hardest not to start crying already, Lydia lights the candles on the coffee table in the McCall house. They decided to have a kind of memorial evening, away from the multitude of Argents’ that had flocked into town for the funeral, where they could share special moments and stories about Allison with each other, preserving her beautiful soul in the only way they could.

Isaac has curled up on the sofa already, a haunted look on his face, and as she walks past him she pats his hand sympathetically. He breaks out of his trance to look up at her, giving her a gentle nod in acknowledgment. She can hear Scott’s low hushed voice as he greets Kira at the front door and her dulcet tone in response, although she can’t hear exactly what they’re saying.

“Shall we start?” he asks as he enters the room with Kira in tow, clasping his hands together as he sinks into the sofa. She can tell he’s trying to take control like an alpha does, but Lydia sees through his sunken eyes and the way his lower lip trembles when he talks. She knows that he’s barely surviving. He looks as close to shattering as she feels.

Lydia freezes for a moment, her body going numb from head to toe. “Where's Stiles?” she asks, voice just on the precipice of menacing as if she can already tell what his best friend’s response is going to be.

“He's not coming,” Scott answers, looking up into Lydia’s eyes trying to convey the need for her not to blow up at what he’s about to say. “He’s with Malia tonight.”

Her mouth twisting uncomfortably, Lydia feels hot, angry tears building up behind her eyes. “Really.” It’s a statement, not a question. Lydia wishes it was hard to believe that Stiles would do this to her, to them, but she’s not surprised. Her fury rises exponentially, and Lydia can see her hands physically shaking with it.

“Lydia,” Scott tries, attempting to calm her down. She scoffs, looking away from him, casting her eyes to the pale blue light of dusk outside his windows. Scott rises from his seat. “Lydia, come talk to me for a minute,” he urges, wrapping his hand around hers and pulling her gently into the hallway away from Isaac and Kira.

With a frustrated growl, Lydia smacks her hands a few times against the handrail of the staircase before Scott shushes her and grabs her wrists, pulling her away from the wood and towards his body. “I know, okay? I get it,” he whispers solemnly.

“Scott.” Lydia gasps, the hot tears finally leaking from eyes and tracking down her cheeks. She’s been trying so hard to hold it together, so hard not to just crumble into dust and it’s too much. She feels like she’s dying. Like Allison. “He should be here. We’re burying her tomorrow. He should _be_ _here_ ,” she repeats brokenly.

“He can't. He’s not handling it.” Scott brings a hand up to her cheek, wiping away one of her tears with his thumb. “He's avoiding. He blames himself.”

Lydia shakes her head, her entire body hurting with heartbreak. “But we don't blame him. And we need him right now. Both of us.” She sucks in a fragile breath. “He's being selfish,” she remarks. Lydia has the urge to walk out of this house right now, drive over to Stiles’ and scream at him until her face turns blue. He’s _hurting_ her. And that’s not something she ever thought he’d do.

“You know he's not thinking about that,” Scott reasons. 

Fire still burns in her lungs. “He should be. Forget the new girl for a night, for god sake,” she adds bitterly. _Jealously?_ Lydia shakes the thought from her head and runs a hand through her hair, uncaring as to whether it’s messy from the action or not.

Scott rests his hands on Lydia’s shoulders, anchoring her to the spot. It makes the spinning feeling in her head ease off, giving her something solid and sure to focus on. “It's not about her. It's about him,” he says understandingly. “He can barely look at us right now. He feels like he… like he took her from us.” Scott’s voice cracks and it makes Lydia want to burst into tears all over again.

“Doesn't matter.” Lydia is unforgiving. “He should think about someone besides himself. Is he even coming tomorrow?”

“Yes. He’ll be there,” Scott says assuredly.

She rolls her eyes, adds mockingly, “Well at least that's something.”

“Lydia, hey.” Scott murmurs, pulling her into a hug and Lydia rests her cheek against his shoulder, the warm soft material of his sweater comforting, his strong arms around her back dependable and sturdy. “Tonight isn't about anger. It's about remembering.”

She sniffles, moving her head to whisper alongside his cheek, “Yeah, this was a really nice idea.”

“It was Kira’s,” Scott answers, rubbing his hand up and down her back.

“Thank her for me?” Lydia asks shyly. She’s not really spoken to Kira much, but she seems sweet. She’s naturally becoming part of the pack, what with her being a kitsune. Lydia doesn’t know what’s going to happen between her and Scott, she knows he was starting something up with her but then Allison...well, Allison isn’t someone you can just get over.

Scott pulls back from Lydia but keeps rubbing comfortingly at her arm. He smiles softly. “Thank her yourself. I think you need her in your life.”

“She’ll never be Allison.”

Scott’s eyes darken, thoughts swirling behind them and Lydia knows hers look similar, blackened in a fog of mourning. “I know. But she can still be important to us,” Scott says in a measured tone. “She can still be your friend.”

Lydia wipes the tears away from her face before smiling gently at him, “Yeah.”

\--

She holds Isaac’s hand during the service, tears silently falling down both of their faces. She feels cold in a way she never has before. Stiles is at the funeral, but he’s lurking at the back, and she hates him for it. He’s one of the few people here who knew Allison for who she truly was: A warrior. Strong, fierce, protective. He should be next to her— next to _Scott_. She thanks the heavens that he didn’t bring Malia with him; that’s the last thing Lydia wants to deal with right now.

Lydia feels more comfortable latching onto her resentment rather than her sadness. She’d rather feel the boiling anger instead of the inevitable numbness she’d be experiencing otherwise. She’s already cried so much her skin’s starting to feel dry from the amount of moisture her body’s expelling. The more she stews in her anger the higher her body temperature gets, and she knows this emotion more than any other isn’t healthy, but it’s working for her right now.

When the service concludes, with Allison in the ground and the majority of her family trailing away from the cemetery, Lydia, Scott, and Isaac step forward. She takes Scott’s hand in her free one and he squeezes it back desperately. Lydia knows he’s barely holding it together. Stiles tentatively steps forward, and she can hear his shoes crunching against the frosty grass behind them.

Lydia turns to look at Scott as Stiles approaches. He reaches a hand out to his shoulder, causing Scott to immediately turn around and fall into his best friend’s arms. She watches Stiles’ face crumple in pain as he rubs his hands up and down Scott’s back. His eyes catch Lydia’s over Scott’s shoulder and she straightens her back, giving him a stony look. Stiles’ expression turns ashamed and his eyes flutter closed in order to escape her icy gaze.

She turns around to focus on Isaac, bringing her now empty hand to his shoulder. “Come on, let’s go,” she whispers to him, and he nods in agreement. No matter how much loss she’s experiencing, she feels an overwhelming sense of sympathy for Isaac. He was already an orphan, and now he’s lost Allison too. Lydia feels a huge sense of relief that he’s leaving with Mr. Argent for Paris tomorrow. He needs to get out of this town, this state, this _country_. He needs the chance to heal.

Mrs. McCall offered up her house for the wake, the Argent apartment too small and claustrophobic for so many people and so much grief. There’s an array of food and booze supplied by the mourners and families of Allison’s peers, but the food is hardly touched, no one really has an appetite after burying a seventeen-year-old girl. Lydia sits on the McCall’s back steps with Isaac, passing a bottle of alcohol back and forth between them silently. She’s never been terribly friendly with Isaac before, but she feels a certain kinship with him now. They’re both so bleeding and broken, they both blame themselves for not being able to save her, they both feel like they’re missing a limb. She wonders if it hurts more for him because he was tethered to Allison during the sacrifice— if he could literally feel the life drain from her like Lydia’s scream made her feel. 

“Lydia.”

Stiles’ voice feels like a knife in her back, and she’d gasp if she wasn’t already on her way to supremely drunk, her reactions slowed by the alcohol coursing through her body. She refuses to turn around to look at him; instead, she holds her hand out to Isaac to seize the bottle back so that she can take a long swig. She winces as it burns on the way down her throat, then swipes her fingers against the liquid that’s just escaping at the corner of her mouth. Red stains her fingers from her lipstick, and it makes her feel sick, picturing the blood on Allison’s mouth, the red covering her fingers as they failed to stem the fluid as it poured from her body. “Lydia,” he repeats, pressing the tips of two fingers to her upper back. He doesn’t even have the guts to put a whole hand on her and she can feel her face twisting in bitterness.

She stands suddenly, her body swaying slightly from the alcohol, and marches down the steps away from him and further into Scott’s backyard. She had taken off her black heels when she’d sat down, and she can feel the dewy grass between her toes and the slight whistling of the wind as it whips around her. Lydia wants Stiles to take the hint, to leave her alone in her grief, but he’s never done what he’s supposed to do. She’d come to love that about him, it often drew him to conclusions nobody else could make, but right now it makes her want to kick him, scratch him, mark him up and make him feel like she does on the inside.

“Go away.” Lydia can hear him breathing behind her. His warm breath contrasting the winter breeze should be the more comforting of the two, but she appreciates nature more; it feels honest.

Nothing about Stiles feels right to her in this moment.

“Lydia, _please_ .” His voice is bordering on desperate. It makes her hate him just a little bit more because Lydia knows Stiles thinks she hates him because he killed her best friend. If he had acted like a man and not a boy, Lydia would’ve been able to tell him that she would never _ever_ blame him for anything the Nogitsune did while wearing his face. She hates him because he chose himself, and his angst, over her and Scott. He chose to bury himself in Malia, because she was utterly removed from the situation and she never knew Allison, instead of coming to her remembrance evening. Her best friend is _dead_. That’s never going to change. She needed him and he left her.

“I can’t even look at you, Stiles. Just leave me alone.” Lydia drops her head, holding back the whimpers in her throat as the tears fall down her cheeks. She will not let him see her cry. Lydia would love to be able to allow herself to collapse into his arms like Scott did earlier, but she can’t forgive him yet. He made his bed, he’s going to lie in it. _Lie in it with her_ , she thinks bitterly.

“I’m so sorry,” he whispers close to her ear, and she can feel his breath brush against her skin, making goosebumps form on the back of her neck. His tone is sincere, but she feels compelled to cross her arms over her body, protecting herself from him. She wiggles her toes against the ground, the grass almost squelching beneath her. He doesn’t linger, finally leaving her alone like she wants him to. She raises her head to the breeze, the cold drawn to the tracks of her tears as they run across the skin of her cheeks. Lydia gasps, her tears finally feeling like release instead of sadness. Allison wouldn’t want her to drown. She’d want her to build herself back up and be better, do better.

Lydia turns around, but refuses to wipe away her tears. She doesn’t have to hide them from anybody because nobody’s opinion matters to her right now. She walks back to Isaac, who’s still sat on the steps and tentatively brings a hand to his cheek. Lydia urges him to stand up and he follows her lead, towering over her without her heels on. She’s compelled to smile as she walks up a couple of steps to bring them to a more appropriate height level. Hesitantly, Lydia leans towards him, planting a soft kiss on his cheek. “Stay in contact, Isaac,” she murmurs quietly, rubbing gently so there’s no lipstick mark left on his skin. “Remember you always have family here.”

As she pulls her hand away from his skin, he catches it and brings her knuckles up to his lips, kissing them tenderly in return. He doesn’t say anything vocally, but his eyes hold so much pain she can feel it radiating off him. She’s not sure if he’ll talk to them much, maybe it will be too painful for him— too many reminders. But she hopes he keeps in contact with Scott, they were close and Allison cared about them tremendously, even if it was in different ways. They’re fractured and bruised, but she doesn’t want it to end that way. They’re a pack. They always will be.

Lydia slides her heels back on, like a piece of armor she’s going to need to face the mourning faces inside. She’s almost to the door when Isaac’s voice penetrates the silence, the first time he’s spoken all day. “Don’t punish him forever, Lydia. You never know when you’re going to run out of time.” She turns her head to look back at him, her eyes locking with his.

Besides the time they spent waiting for the others to wake up from the sacrifice, they haven’t really talked one on one, and even then it was mostly just sniping at each other. She remembers the skinny little fragile boy who asked her out during freshman year, how cold she was to him because she’d already set her sights on lacrosse star Jackson Whittemore. How apparently he tried to kill her with Erica when they thought she was the kanima. She sees a lot of herself in Isaac, despite them being vastly different people. They’re lonely at their core, desperately wanting to let people in but terrified of getting hurt. There’s an Allison-shaped wound in both of their hearts now.

Lydia’s eyes flick down to the wooden porch for a moment, her eyes catching on a part that’s a little splintered. She recognizes that that’s exactly how she feels: splintered. Her eyes trace the wood for a bit longer, running over the lines, the grooves, the chips. She considers the history there, how marked and lengthy it is, but it’s still standing strong— it’s still beautiful, even through the hardship.

She brings her eyes back up to Isaac, who hasn’t moved, he’s just been waiting for her to compose her thoughts. “Thank you.” She smiles sincerely in the fragile moment. There are birds chirping in a garden nearby and it reminds her that life keeps spinning and churning without Allison, even if it doesn’t feel like it should. Lydia turns towards the house, straightens her spine and strides back inside, ignoring the crestfallen face of Stiles Stilinski when she walks past him.

\--

Lydia doesn’t know the last time she was this drunk. In fact, she doesn’t think she’s ever been this drunk. She came out for a night of drinking and dancing with Danny to drown their respective sorrows, hers the more severe of the two. And so when pretty gay guys keep offering to buy her drinks, attempting to win over the adonis that is Danny Mahealani by appearing generous and considerate to his companion— she keeps accepting.

The dancing feels good for a while, hot, sweaty bodies writhing against each other in the club, but the more she dances, the more the alcohol sloshes about in her system and she starts to feel lightheaded and dizzy. She stumbles her way through the crowd to the bathroom, resting her hands on either side of the sink as she tries to catch her breath and clear her head. Lydia stares at the reflection of the girl in front of her, all too similar to the Lydia that existed pre-Allison, pre-banshee, pre-supernatural pack. Except this girl has pain in her eyes that that girl had never experienced.

Lydia’s brain kicks in for a moment, and she sends off a text to Scott that says ‘come get me please, at jungle’. She slips her phone back into her clutch and readjusts the strap, securing it around her wrist. The dull thumping in the restroom becomes a roar as the door opens and a group of girls wanders in, their voices piercing against Lydia’s skull as they speak in their high-pitch. She forgets about the text and steps back into the throng of dancing bodies, losing herself in a song that used to be one of her favorites.

Somebody grabs hold of Lydia’s waist and pulls her towards him, grinding his hips against hers to the beat of the song. She revels in the opportunity to indulge herself by feeling the body of a random stranger pressed against her and closes her eyes, succumbing to the brief pleasure she gets from the contact. Once again, she feels like she’s experiencing things the way the old Lydia would, simpler thrills that used to turn her on before the touch of a certain boy’s hand would make her heart swell in longing, a boy whose arms would ground her and make her feel protected until they didn't anymore.

Suddenly the other arms don’t give her nearly as much reprieve.

Eyes still closed, she turns around in the stranger’s arms and finds his lips with hers. He tastes like beer and smoke, slightly bitter in a way Lydia welcomes because it doesn’t remind her of anyone or anything and she can just lose herself in it for a while. It doesn’t excite her, it doesn’t send a warm tingling feeling through her blood or make goosebumps rise on her arms, but it makes her feel desired and normal. This guy doesn’t know she’s a banshee, he doesn’t know her best friend died ten days ago, he doesn’t want anything from her except her willing body.

“Lydia.” The voice nearly makes her swallow her tongue, or the other guy’s— either way, somebody nearly got severely deformed. She breaks away from her makeout partner and turns to look behind her and there’s Stiles, standing in the middle of the dance floor, a worried look on his face as everyone dances around them. It looks almost comical, and Lydia’s alcohol-muddled mind can’t help but laugh. It just makes Stiles’ forehead crease further.

“What are you doing here?” Lydia asks haughtily, her eyes a little sluggish as they blink.

“I came with Scott. You texted him, remember?” Stiles steps closer to them, giving her suitor a look as if to say ‘you’re done here’ and it makes a sharp shock of arousal spread through her lower body. Her knees weaken slightly and Stiles puts a hand on her back to steady her. She can feel the heat of his palm through her tiny dress. _Oh, she is way too drunk for this._

“I was just having fun,” Lydia insists, like a scorned child. There’s a part of her that wants to bury her head in his chest, and she really has to restrain herself from giving into that urge. She wishes Scott hadn’t brought Stiles with him, there was a method to her asking one to come and not the other. Their inseparability can be inconvenient sometimes.

“I’m sure,” he returns. And it sounds like there are a hundred other things he’s holding back from saying instead. They aren’t on speaking terms yet, well, Stiles has been trying to contact Lydia since the funeral and Lydia has been deliberately ignoring him. It feels like their relationship is back to what it was at the start of the year with Stiles holding back words so as not to push Lydia away with them. She hates that.

She looks up to his face, watching the strobe lights flitting over his skin, lighting it up sporadically. They’re such a mess. They’re standing in the middle of the club looking like fish out of the water. They're flailing. This isn’t her life anymore, and no matter how much she wishes she could switch everything off and go back, Lydia knows she likes the person she is now more because of the people she’s been influenced by. She just wishes it didn’t hurt so damn much.

Stiles’ eyes squint as he looks around the club, trying to find Scott. When he fails, his eyes drift down to look at her face. They’re almost pressed together in the middle of the dance floor, completely unmoving like statues. It feels like a moment that is frozen in time. Her eyes fill with tears as she considers the ruins they’re standing. The ruins of the pack, of their relationship, of everything. It feels like an impossible task to build it back up.

When Lydia blinks to try and dissipate the water, she sees a flash of Malia behind her eyes and it makes her physically recoil. It’s like a switch is flicked in her brain and she shuts down the vulnerability of the moment. “Are you taking me home or not?” she asks brazenly.

He nods. “Yeah, I am.” Stiles’ eyelashes flutter as he considers his next move, his hand twitches on her back and he pushes her in front of him. She thinks for a second he was considering taking her hand and leading her out of the club, and the fact that he decided against it causes her head to throb painfully, or maybe that’s just the combination of alcohol and loud music. _So hand-holding is officially off the table now_ , she notes.

Lydia wobbles as she leaves the club and is hit by a fleet of cold winter air. She brings a hand up to the wall, the roughness of the brick grating against her soft palm. Nausea hits her and she leans forward, wanting the ground to swallow her up. Stiles follows her and keeps a hand pressed to her back gently, rubbing it up and down to soothe her. She hears him take out his phone and tell Scott to meet them outside.

“Do you want to get in the car?” Stiles asks her softly, pushing strands of her hair away from her face and over her shoulders. Having him tenderly take care of her while she’s on the verge of throwing up just makes her feel sicker considering the state of their relationship.

“I’m not throwing up in your jeep,” she utters, shuffling slightly on her heels so the soles scuff on the concrete.

He laughs softly, “I appreciate that.” He moves his hands so they’re pressed into each of her shoulders and massages them gently. She dislikes that it’s comforting because Stiles shouldn’t represent comfort to her anymore. Lydia wants to turn around and scream at him until her lungs burn but she just doesn’t have the will.

Scott joins them outside the club, leaning down next to her so he can see her face. “You doing okay?”

“I’m fine,” she brushes off his worried tone. “Do you have any water?” Lydia asks.

“There’s some in the jeep, I’ll be right back,” Stiles replies.

Lydia immediately feels colder now that Stiles’ hands aren’t on her skin and it makes her visibly shudder. She turns her head towards Scott and whispers, “I wish you would’ve come alone.”

Scott looks apologetic as he realizes his mistake. “Sorry, it just seemed like a good idea to have two of us looking for you.”

Lydia nods in acceptance as Stiles reemerges beside her, bringing the water bottle in front of her face for her to take. “Thanks.” Scott takes his jacket off and puts it around Lydia’s shoulders, and for the first time since that fatal scream ripped its way through her body, it feels like they might be okay. They won’t be the same, not as happy as they were, but they’ll make it through.

Lydia turns around and settles her back against the wall, Scott’s jacket providing her with a shield of warmth as the boys chit-chat beside her. Her mind is too fuzzy to keep up with what they’re talking about but she continues to sip the water gingerly. She doesn’t feel like she has to escape her own body or her life right now, and that feels like _progress_.

“You good now?” Stiles questions.

Good is a relative term, but she's not going to nitpick. “I think so, yeah,” she replies, the smallest of smiles turning her mouth up at the corners. The lighter energy seems to be infecting them all simultaneously, and they place a hand on each shoulder, guiding her to the jeep. They settle her in the back and she curls up, pulling Scott’s jacket tighter around her. “Can you maybe just drive around for a while?”

They both glance back at her lying on the seat and Scott looks at her fondly before asking, “Sure. You want some music on?”

“Yes please.” Her voice has returned to the realm of happy-drunk with an edge of sleepiness to it, as she's lulled to sleep by the moving car she once again takes comfort in the hushed voices of the two most important men in her life.

/

Stiles can’t help turning around to look at her sleeping figure at every stop light. It's just instinctive. He needs to make sure she's still there, that she's okay, that she's safe. It's something he hasn't been able to do for over a week because she's wanted nothing to do with him.

“Stiles, the light,” Scott murmurs as a car behind them honks.

“Shit,” he replies, pushing down on the accelerator, and the car lurches forward.

The jeep is quiet for a while as they drive around Beacon Hills, taking the long way back to Lydia’s house. Stiles can feel a deep frown embedded in his forehead.

“She’ll be okay,” Scott says soberly and Stiles can see Scott looking at him from the corner of his eye. He hums unsurely in response. “She will,” his best friend says more emphatically.

“How do you know?”

“Because if I’m going to make it through, there's no way Lydia isn't.” He smiles sadly. “She's stronger than all of us.” He forgets sometimes that they all have their individual relationships with each other— that it’s not just him and Scott, or him and Lydia, but that Scott and Lydia are friends too, separate from him.

“I just wish she’d talk to me,” Stiles says with a shake of his head as he watches the traffic in front of him, the lights illuminating the road like twinkling Christmas lights, but without the joy the holiday season brings.

Scott winces.

“What?”

“This isn't about you, Stiles.” Scott’s face is harder than he's ever seen it. And Stiles has never felt more out of his depth.

“I...I didn't say it was.”

Scott sighs. “Lydia needs to find a way to heal that works for her. All we can do is be here. And keep her safe. It's not up to her to talk to us, or to even let us in. You said ‘ _I_ wish she'd talk to _me_ ’, that's about what you want. Not what she needs.”

His grip tightens around the steering wheel. “So I'm just supposed to leave her alone?”

“No. You're supposed to show up.”

It feels like a punch to his gut. Because he's always thought to himself that he'd run into a burning building to keep Lydia safe. He'd do anything. But keeping her alive and keeping her trust are not the same things. And he'd jeopardized their relationship because he didn't think his actions through. She doesn't think she can rely on him anymore. She doesn’t want to. And that’s on him.

Stiles knows things are still frosty between them, but it seems like, even though she wasn’t happy to see him that after tonight, the tense atmosphere is beginning to thaw. He’s incredibly grateful for that because now he knows what’s it’s like to have Lydia in his life, as one of his closest friends, he doesn’t ever want to lose that. They’ve lost too much already.

/

Lydia stirs when she's jostled about a bit, realizing she's no longer in the back of the jeep but that whatever is supporting her is moving, a heartbeat thumping against her body. “Mm, Stiles?”

“Nope, just me. Stiles is waiting in the car.” Scott says quietly, slowly ascending the stairs as he carries her in his arms.

She sighs softly. “Okay. Thanks for coming to get me.” Lydia secures her arms around his neck for stability.

“You must know by now that we’ll always come for you, Lydia.” Scott’s tone is light but there's a wealth of meaning behind it. He's letting her know how important she is to them so readily and easily. It makes warmth envelope her, not for the first time tonight. She loves these boys.

Scott gently drops her down on her bed and undoes her heels for her, placing them beside the furniture. Her head still feels woozy, but this night ended so much better than she thought it would when she first went out. The darkness had been twisting thorny vines around her heart and now it feels like she can see the potential for new flowers to bloom come springtime. No matter how much she's lost, she still has people that care about her. It's not the same. But she doesn't want it to be. No one can replace what Allison was to her.

“Sleep well, Lydia. Tomorrow’s a new day.” He sounds far away and a little wistful, and if there's someone who has been more wrecked by the events of the last month than her, it's Scott McCall. She really can't fathom how he keeps such unwavering optimism, but it inspires her. _Tomorrow’s a new day_ , she repeats as she succumbs to sleep.

 


	2. Part 2

Kira, being the considerate and good-hearted person that she is, chooses to invite both Lydia and Malia to a slumber party. Lydia can't find it in her to reject the idea when confronted with Kira’s earnestness and barely restrained excitement but she's not crazy about spending the evening with Malia. 

It isn’t that she has a problem with Malia per se, it's more accurate to say she's keeping her at arm’s length. From the time they've spent together around the same lunch table, Lydia’s been able to deduce that Malia is very blunt and currently seems pretty uninterested in anyone other than Stiles. It grates on her, somebody so seemingly selfish being part of the pack when they just recently lost people to completely selfless actions. But she doesn't actively dislike her.

Lydia would be more inclined to reject the idea of the three of them hanging out for an entire night if her own social calendar hadn't recently taken a monumental hit. She used to spend several nights a week with Allison, and there's no one left to fill her evenings with other  _recreational_ activities. Lydia does genuinely want to be better friends with Kira as well; the light, airy quality she radiates lifts all of their spirits, and she has the ability to make someone smile without even trying.

Lydia's at her locker at the end of the day when Malia and Stiles’ voices travel from further down the hallway. “It would be really good if you could get closer to the girls.”

“Why? I only want you,” Malia says frankly, and Lydia rolls her eyes in response. They clearly don't know she's there, so she doesn't even have to make the decision about whether to leave or not. Lydia likes to have as much information as possible, and if she has to eavesdrop to get it, so be it.

“Because we’re a pack, okay? We’ve talked about this. They want to be your friends,” Stiles encourages. The soft tone of his voice makes Lydia’s jaw clench, she can envision him rubbing Malia’s shoulders and staring imploringly into her eyes.

“Kira does, she's nice. I don't think Lydia does,” Malia muses. Lydia’s eyebrows lift in interest; maybe the other girl is more observant than she assumed.

She hears Stiles sigh, and Lydia doesn't know whether it's in agreement or not without seeing the look on his face. “Lydia’s been through a lot. Remember, her best friend just died? She needs some compassion.” It really annoys her that Stiles is referring to Allison as ‘her best friend’ as if she was nothing to him— as if she wasn't an incredibly important part of all of their lives.

“I don't know how to do that,” Malia replies. And Lydia has to give her credit for her honesty. She gets that after being a full-on coyote for the best part of a decade that Malia hasn't quite got to grasp with the complexity of human interactions and emotions yet. So maybe she can give her the benefit of the doubt and really try tonight at Kira’s. Maybe.

/

“You like Scott, right?” Malia directs towards Kira while Lydia meticulously paints Malia’s toes.

“Oh,” Kira replies, eyes wide. “I mean, yeah. We kissed before, but then, y’know, after Allison, I don't know if he wants to go there anymore.” She’s so well-intentioned and innocent that, for the first time, Lydia doesn't feel like she's being stabbed when Allison’s name is mentioned. She thinks that's a good thing.

Lydia doesn't look up from Malia’s toes. “Give him time. I know he likes you, he just needs some time to heal.” It hurts her a little to imagine Scott moving on from Allison—  she always believed deep down that they’d sort out their issues eventually and get back together. And now they’ll never have that chance.

“Yeah?” Kira asks hopefully, and Lydia pauses her actions to look over at her and nod reassuringly.

“Has Stiles had a girlfriend before?” Malia asks. It's the first time Lydia can remember Malia directly addressing her, and it irritates her that it's about Stiles. He's the last thing she wants to talk to Malia about if they’re actually going to become friends.

Lydia hums, looking back at Malia’s toes again as she tries not to smudge the polish. “No.” She thinks if she keeps her answers short and blunt, the conversation will move on to something else.

Malia’s tone is thoughtful when she responds, “It sometimes feels like there was someone else though. Like, the way he looks when I say something or ask him certain things. Kind of like I’m in somebody’s shadow?”

“I don't know what to tell you.” Lydia aims for nonchalance, but her heart beats a little faster anyway. What she isn’t prepared for is Kira having gotten a detailed backstory on their pack history from Scott.

“Didn't he used to have a crush on you, Lydia?” Kira adds. And she knows it makes her a terrible person, but for a second Lydia genuinely wants to muzzle Kira and throw her out a second story window. She has quick reflexes and acrobatic abilities, she'd be fine.

Lydia looks up at Malia to see her brow furrowed as she looks back at her with interest like she's trying to figure her out. It makes Lydia feel a little too naked. She doesn't trust Malia enough for her to have access to seeing beneath her carefully constructed armor yet. “I didn't know that,” Malia says. Lydia has just finished Malia’s nails and the revelation causes Malia to pull away from her physically like she's preparing to shut Lydia out and literally fight her for Stiles if she needs to. “That makes more sense.”

“It's ancient history. Nothing ever happened,” Lydia responds. But it feels like there’s a weight crushing against her chest because she knows she's lying. It's not ancient history, and something did happen. However brief, however unacknowledged, there was something there. There still is, from her at least. But it doesn't matter anymore, he's with Malia.

Malia looks unsure, as if she doesn't quite trust Lydia not to sprout claws and try and steal Stiles from her clutches. “So are you dating anyone?” Malia questions. It comes across as a test to Lydia, and it annoys her. She feels like her place in the pack is being undermined by someone who’s only been around for a few weeks. If there was a hierarchy, other than Scott as their leader, their  _alpha_ , it has Stiles and her at the top of the totem pole. She’s not in the business of being usurped by a new werecoyote just because she’s romantically linked to the second in command (though she suspects Stiles would take offense to being labeled second fiddle).

“Considering the last guy in my life died to ninjas being controlled by a demonic fox spirit, with a sword through his torso? No. I think I’m done with dating for a while, sweetheart.” Lydia knows she’s entered ‘bitch-mode’, but she doesn't have the energy to pretend to be nice to Malia right now. “Shall we change the topic?”

Kira nods enthusiastically, wanting to salvage the mood of the evening before it gets too hostile. She asks them to look through her movie collection and choose something while she goes to make some popcorn, and Lydia internally laughs at the fact that Kira is trying to diffuse the situation but is entirely removing herself from it at the same time to avoid conflict.

“Sorry,” Malia murmurs somewhat sheepishly as she rifles through Kira’s DVDs.

“Only say that if you mean it,” Lydia retorts. She’s never going to be friends with Malia if she’s hiding behind falsities. She spent too many years of her life with people like that.

Malia looks irritated for a second. “Stiles told me to say sorry if I made someone mad or sad. I’m just doing what he said.”

“And I’m letting you know you shouldn’t do it if it's not sincere. If you actually feel bad, say sorry. If not, don’t bother.” Lydia isn’t going to coddle Malia. She thinks she’ll actually find her candor refreshing once she gets used to her. Malia doesn’t need to be fake in order to learn social graces or how to bond with people. She just needs some guidance.

\--

“So I have a favor to ask,” he begins tentatively.

“‘ _Hello Lydia_ ’, ‘ _How’s your day been Lydia_?’,  _‘What hideously supernatural thing am I going to burden you with today, Lydia?_ ’” She couldn't repress the mocking tone if she tried.

“Hi. Sorry,” Stiles apologizes, shaking his head slightly when he realizes strolling up to her and asking for something is ill-mannered. “So I was wondering if we could use your lake house?” Stiles’ mouth twists into a pout in an attempt to soften her irritation.

Lydia swears her heart stops for a second at the conclusion her mind comes to. “Please tell me you're not asking to use my lake house for sex.” She slams her locker with force and clasps her fingers tightly around the edge of her books, the spines almost groaning under the pressure. Her heel taps against the hallway floor in barely repressed anger.

Stiles’ eyes widen in stunned fear and he raises his palms like he’s surrendering. “No! No, I promise, that's not it. I need to take Malia somewhere for the full moon, somewhere I can chain her up so she doesn't go out and kill people or run back into the woods and never come back.” His voice is sincere and it releases some of the pressure in her chest, but the image of them mid-coitus is still prevalent in her mind. He continues, “When Scott was learning I handcuffed him to his radiator and it didn't work. I thought it might be more secure and away from interruptions.”

Lydia’s eyes drift down because she doesn’t want him to be able to read into her expression too much, not that she suspects he would, he’s mostly had a one-track mind recently. “Oh, okay. Yeah, the house is empty, that should be okay. I'll bring you the keys.”

This would usually be the point where he can’t resist touching her arm to convey his gratitude, but instead, his fingers curl around the straps of his backpack, twisting them from side to side. He’s standing right in front of her but she  _misses_  him. “I’m very thankful, I owe you one.” He sounds earnest as he backs away from her down the hallway, smiling cheerfully. The afternoon sun shines behind him and Lydia hates the way it makes her physically ache.

\--

“Lydiaaaaaa!” Stiles sing-songs down the phone at her cloyingly.

“Are you drunk?” she questions, pulling her phone away from her ear for a moment, narrowing her eyes when she sees it’s only five in the evening.

Stiles scoffs. “Obviously not, no. Just...might need a favor?” He sounds apprehensive like he’s preparing for her to cuss him out and hang up on him simultaneously.

Lydia sighs, she projects an air of annoyance to mask the fact that she’s really a little amused. This is the most normal things have felt between them in ages. “What did you do?”

“My jeep _may_  have broken down slightly, a temporary glitch I assure you. It’ll be all ready for the trip to  _Mehico_.” The overdramatic and poor pronunciation almost makes her laugh out loud, she struggles to bite it back. “However, I  _did_  just get the 50k to buy Derek back from the Calaveras and I’m not so crazy about the idea of walking home with that much money in the dark?”

“You want me to come and get you?” Lydia interprets. She’s a little surprised. “Why can’t Scott do it?”

“I’d feel safer having it in a car rather than on the back of a bike.” Stiles supplies. It feels like a flimsy reason, it would certainly be safer around an alpha werewolf as opposed to a banshee. But she’ll take the bait.

“Okay. Send me the details and I’ll be there soon,” Lydia agrees.

/

He’s leaning against the jeep on the side of the road when she pulls up. As he makes his way to her passenger door, she winds down the window and, without thinking, jokes, “Is that fifty grand in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?”

Stiles looks flabbergasted for a minute, his mouth opening and closing in shock. It’s like she can physically see his brain short-circuiting, and when he finally regains mobility he fumbles for the door handle and sinks into the seat beside her, almost like she made his legs weak. His cheeks are tinged pink and she doesn’t think it’s from the cold weather. Not the reaction she was expecting, to say the least.

“You know I’m always pleased to see you, Lydia,” he mutters. It’s an acknowledgment of what she said, but it rubs her up the wrong way. Where’s the witty retort Stiles would usually get  _way_  too much enjoyment out of contributing?

“It was a joke,” she clarifies, not allowing herself to look at him. She stares at the road ahead and checks her mirrors and blind spot before setting off again.

“No, I got that. I just wasn’t expecting it.” Stiles sounds contemplative and she’s almost irritated that he ruined her good mood and made things awkward between them again.

Lydia releases a humorless laugh. “The class clown is the only one allowed to be funny now?” Her tone is sharp and stern to cover the embarrassment she feels.

“I'm sorry. It's not about that. Things just haven't been the same since...” Stiles is getting way too serious for what was supposed to be a simple gesture of driving him home. Lydia was not mentally prepared to deal with this.

“I'm aware of that. I'm trying to find a new normal here.” Lydia shakes her head a little. “Starting to wish Scott was here as a buffer, at least he would've laughed.”

“No, it was funny. Just maybe no jokes like that in front of Malia? She can get a little...possessive.” Lydia can’t refrain from rolling her eyes.  _And we’re back to the Malia of it all again._

Lydia adds simply, “I've noticed.” After all, it was less than a week ago that Malia was ready to throw down over him and start a catfight.

“You have?” Stiles’ voice has a tinge of intrigue that Lydia instantly dislikes. He’s not allowed to have his cake and eat it too. He’s starting something with Malia, he can’t be intrigued by Lydia noticing things about their interactions.  _Draw a line, buddy, either I’m your friend or I’m more._

Lydia chooses not to respond. The last thing she wants right now is to discuss Stiles’ love life with him. He has Scott for that.

They’re quiet for a while, the tension not unbearable but it's not the atmosphere she hoped for when she began this excursion. “Do you think this plan is gonna work?” he asks.

“No,” Lydia replies readily, unblinking as she navigates her car through Beacon Hills.

“It has the potential to though, right?” Stiles taps his fingers against her dashboard to a rhythm she doesn’t recognize. She’s been studying human anatomy most of the day and is therefore hyper-aware of bodily movements in general, but of his in particular. It takes all of her willpower not to look over at his long fingers and their rapid movements, not to watch the gentle dance of the sinuous veins that work their way up from his hands to his forearms. Arms that will no doubt be wrapped around his girlfriend in a matter of hours. The thought makes her knuckles clench against the steering wheel in frustration. “Lydia? You still with me?”

“Sorry. What?” she responds, shaking herself out of her daze.

“You missed the turn to my house. What were you thinking about?” There goes that intrigue again.

“I was just wondering if Derek’s okay or not,” Lydia lies. Although that is something she’s worried about. She did conclude that he’s not dead, but something is most certainly off. She thinks Stiles and Scott are overestimating the power they hold when up against a hunting group as strong as the Calaveras, but unprepared doesn’t mean they’re going to be reckless. No one else dies. Everyone comes home. That’s where the plan needs to work.

“We’ll get him back,” Stiles says confidently.

Lydia pulls up to his house and parks but doesn't turn the engine off, expecting him to shoot off as soon as the car stops. But he doesn't. He sits in quiet contemplation beside her and she watches him closely now she's no longer required to keep her focus on the road. Stiles isn't looking back at her, instead, his eyes are focused on a thread he's fingering on his jeans.

Lydia keeps waiting for him to say whatever’s on his mind but the silence just continues. When he finally raises his eyes to hers, the conflict in them halts her breath for a moment. There's something _unnerving_  about the way he looks at her sometimes, like his eyes penetrate down to her core.

“What?” she can't help but ask softly, and the way that singular word breaks the silence makes it seem like all of the oxygen is sucked out of the car.

He blinks slowly, and his eyes look hauntingly lost. The emotion being conveyed seems raw, as if he's finally let his guard down for just a moment. Ever since the Nogitsune he's held so much back from her, from everyone probably, and he's different. It goes beyond the loss of those that were taken from them. It reminds her of what the Nogitsune said to her when she was kidnapped, there's a darkness in him that she hadn’t wanted to acknowledge was there. A shadow. A burden. And that, more than Allison and Aiden’s deaths, more than Malia being with him, is why their relationship has shifted. There’s a despondency within him that’s made it’s way to the surface. Maybe it was always there and she didn’t quite realize what would happen if it overtook him. She wonders if his light will ever come back completely.

Lydia was the one with walls up, while Stiles had been like an open book. And she wouldn't say the reverse is true now because she's certainly not transparent by any means, but Stiles doesn't wear his heart on his sleeve anymore. Part of her misses the innocence and freedom he used to possess; another part of her wants to wrap her arms around him and tell him it’s going to be okay, even if she doesn’t quite believe it.

“Thanks for the ride.” The corners of his mouth twitch up in a small smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. It does nothing to quiet the worry Lydia has for him. She wants so badly for him to tell her what’s on his mind, wants to be able to  _talk_  to him like they used to. It doesn’t feel like they’ll ever have that kind of relationship again.

He moves a hand to her upper arm and rubs it gently, nodding at her before he exits the car and strides up to his house, unlocking the door and giving her a brief wave. She's sure that, come tomorrow, this will all be forgotten and ignored. It won't be brought up again and she'll probably never know what thoughts were swirling around inside his head.

\--

Lydia’s bedroom door bursts open, banging against her wall loudly as she shoots up in bed, awoken in shock. “Rise and shine! We've gotta have a supernatural debrief,” Stiles greets.

“Stiles, you can't just waltz into my bedroom unannounced,” she argues, too shaken to truly contemplate murder. He stands beside her bed, a cheeky grin on his face that she hates to admit sends traitorous butterflies fluttering around her stomach.

He pulls a hand out from behind his back, proffering a steaming styrofoam cup from her favorite coffee shop. “I brought you a skinny mocha.”

 _Ah, bribery._ Lydia faux-glares at him and grabs the cup, taking a quick sip that causes her to release an involuntary hum of pleasure. “You're  _tentatively_  forgiven if this information is of vital importance.”

Stiles throws his body across the foot of her bed. “It is. I assure you. There are several points we have to go over.” Lydia kicks at his body, shoving it away from her feet to a chorus of ‘ _Ow_ ’s until he settles further away from her.

Lydia smirks into her coffee, taking another long sip. She waves her other hand in his direction and remarks, “Okay, you may proceed.”

He nods. “I'll start out light and work my way up to the kicker.” He raises one finger, counting out the problems. “Number one: nice work with the heads up to Scott about Sean, he was eating a deputy's intestines when Mrs. McCall found him. It's lucky Scott got there when he did or she would've been next.”

Lydia's eyes widen in horror. “Oh god. Is she okay?”

“Yeah. She's fine,” Stiles says with ease, as if it's not a big deal that someone's intestines were eaten. She supposes he's all too used to the realities of life-and-death after coming face to face with it so many times. Maybe she should be too. “Scott said he was a wendigo, we did some research on them once, didn't we?”

Eyes looking off into the distance, Lydia recollects the knowledge they have on the wendigo in the back of her mind. “Cannibalistic. Yeah, makes sense considering the hidden locker full of frozen bodies Deputy Parrish and I found.” She sighs. “Carry on to point two.”

Stiles raises a second finger. “Number two: Malia was looking over your math notes and…” he pauses, reaching for his backpack by the side of her bed. He pulls out her notebook, flips to a particular page and hands it over to her. An array of illegible symbols fill the paper. “...They’re not notes. It looks like code. It's probably important. Something you should look into.” His tone takes on an edge of worry, and Lydia’s freezes, fear seizing her mind.

“I didn't even know I was doing this. Is this the Nemeton all over again?”

“Probably,” he says, wincing sympathetically.

She throws the notes on her nightstand, plops the cup down and burrows down into her comforter. “I wanna go back to sleep. Screw the mocha,” she complains petulantly.

Stiles puts up a third finger and wiggles it. “Oh, we haven't gotten to three yet, Lydia.”

Lydia groans. “I hate you.” Stiles chuckles.

“Number three: when Sean was trying to kill Scott, this freshman, Liam,  _crazy_  good lacrosse player by the way,” Lydia raises an uncaring eyebrow, “was there and in order to stop him falling off the hospital roof Scott had to...bite him.”

She blinks. “...He what?”

“We officially have a beta.” Stiles smiles unsurely. “If he doesn't die, of course,” he adds flippantly.

With a raise of her finger, Lydia announces, “I have an addendum to number three.”

“Full moon tonight, I know.” Stiles nods in agreement. “I’m dating a werecoyote, remember?”

She keeps her expression stone-faced. _How could I forget?_ Lydia’s jaw clenches and she reaches for her coffee again, swallowing down a mouthful of mocha to hide her reaction. It’s like razor blades lining her esophagus this time, the remembrance of Malia and Stiles, ‘the couple,’ tearing her apart from the inside out. This time she really  _does_  want to curl up under the covers and just disappear from the world, both supernatural and regular. Lydia points at Stiles. “You're dealing with the beta.” Then, to herself, “I'm focusing on the code.”

“There's also...a fourth point,” he adds sheepishly. He remembers a second later to put up his fourth finger and waves his whole hand at her now that all his fingers are outstretched, each one representing a problem they have to deal with.

Lydia groans again. “It gets worse?”

He shrugs. “Scott saw the guy that killed Sean, and obviously killed his whole family too. He had no mouth.”

“No mouth? At all?” She narrows her eyes at him. Of course, it’s not impossible, everything they come up against shouldn’t be physiologically possible, but they exist nonetheless. And now, apparently, there is a murderer with no mouth as well.

“Another supernatural killer in the mix.”

Lydia pushes herself out of bed with a flurry of movement, stalking over to her closet. She places her hands on her hips and peers into it thoughtfully, “Is it too late for me to book a flight to Hawaii? I could do with some time to work on my tan.”

There’s a soft laugh from behind her. “Might not want to buy the tickets just yet.” She can hear him getting up from her bed behind her, his footsteps soft on her bedroom carpet as he walks around the room. “You can't go in the middle of the school year anyway.”

She clicks her tongue in disagreement. “They wouldn't notice, I barely have any classes at this point.”

“Rub it in, why don’t you?” he jokes, and Lydia can’t resist the smile that emerges on her face. “Can I get the keys to the lake house again for tonight?”

And Lydia’s smile is gone as suddenly as it appeared. The reality of Stiles helping Malia with her transformation in Lydia’s place— it still feels wrong and bitter and twisted. Like he’s taking something that’s so important to her and giving it to someone else. Like he’s metaphorically stomping her heart into the dirt. “Yeah, mom will give them to me later. Are we done?” she asks aloofly, not turning around to look at him for even a moment. Lydia’s acting skills aren’t the best before she’s put on her superficial armor.

“Yeah, sure. See you at school.” And he leaves. Lydia takes a moment to center herself, trying to find some fire within her to face the day. If she wants that energy buzzing through her veins, the best thing she can do is put a little extra effort into her outfit, and that includes her best push-up bra.

When Lydia’s finished getting ready, she picks up the notepad full of illegible code on her nightstand, her heart clenching when she sees the words ‘You’ve got this!’ and a little smiley face in the corner of the page. It almost feels as good as the split second she catches him noticing her push-up bra later that day. Almost.

\--

Lydia can’t think of many places she’d less like to be than traveling in the back of the jeep with Malia and Stiles up front. In Mexico she’d had Kira as a buffer, keeping tension simmering below the surface, but this is just awkward. And they all feel it.

Things are slowly beginning to neutralize between her and Malia as the other girl acclimatizes to society and no longer sees Lydia as a threat to her... _relationship_. However, being in such close proximity to the couple twists Lydia’s stomach into knots. At one point she thinks both of them can spot the nauseous look on her face and she has to force out a lie about feeling carsick. Lydia doesn’t think either of them really buy it, but the duration between the worried looks Stiles sends her through the mirror gets longer and longer as the drive continues.

After what Stiles had told her this morning, she feels more on edge than she has in ages. Everything seems to be starting up again. It’s always only a matter of time, but she wishes it wasn’t now. She feels unsettled— and lonely. Scott is understandably worried about his new beta, Kira is infatuated with Scott, and Malia and Stiles spend almost all of their time together. Jealousy be damned, she misses her best friends, and now more than ever, she notices Allison’s absence. Her best friend knew how to relax her and open her up in a way no one else does. And she misses her. It’s constant. Not having her as a sounding board makes it feel like she’s screaming into an abyss. Nobody hears her.

Some people seem to find it all too easy to forget what happened less than two months ago, and it makes a bitterness burn on the tip of her tongue as she holds it in. Her grief comes and goes in waves, and right now it’s starting to feel like she’s floating out in the middle of the ocean trying not to drown. She can scream and scream and nobody will hear her. There's no raft, no rescue, but it's like there's a boat just out of reach on the horizon that doesn't see her struggling to keep her head above the surface as her lungs are filled with seawater.

This is only enhanced when she's forced to throw a faux party filled with freshmen who just can't keep their hands to themselves. Without her dad’s income, she and her mom are starting to struggle. A teacher’s salary isn't much, and even though her mom gets some hazard pay because Beacon Hills High School is getting quite the negative reputation due to so many teachers getting killed, it’s still not  _enough_. Her dad usually sends them money as a way to diffuse his own guilt for abandoning his daughter, but according to his most recent email he's in the middle of changing jobs and is therefore having a ‘cash flow’ problem. She thinks that's a convenient lie, and that it's much more likely he chose to spend the money buying the attention of whatever bimbo caught his eye this month. Probably his secretary. He’s such a cliché.

So her mother resolves to selling the lake house, which annoys Lydia because she always felt closest to her grandmother here. Whenever things got too much, particularly during her parent’s tumultuous divorce, she'd come up to the lake house to escape. The way these teenagers are recklessly wreaking havoc on it makes Lydia feel like the  _one_  tangible thing she has to rely on is being vandalized. And the fact that she has to handle it alone causes her blood to boil underneath her skin. She's not equipped to handle this right now. Not with the myriad of negative feelings building up inside her and wrapping themselves around her throat like they're choking her.

When all the exterior sound is sucked out of the room upstairs and she is pulled by some cosmic force towards that record player, the static opens her mind up to the voices of the dead. She truly feels like a harbinger of it, and it's all-encompassing. Cold. Lonely. Lydia doesn't know how long she stands there, seeing faces appear in the wall, whispers filling her mind with so much information, some useful and some seeming pointless. But at least it makes her stomach twist for an entirely different reason than it was at the beginning of the evening.

When the code is unlocked with Allison’s name, seeing her own name on the Deadpool comes as no surprise. She had already known it was going to be there. Lydia is past caring about who comes for her— but she’ll do anything in her power to make sure the other people on that list, particularly the ones she cares about, will not be preyed upon by some mundane, money-grabbing murderers. They took on a dark druid and an evil fox, and maybe they didn't all survive, but they conquered them.

She doesn't really have much else to lose at this point.

\--

Stiles receives an email from Lydia that simply says ‘I unlocked this page of code. It’s a Deadpool. Figures add up to the same amount stolen from the vault.’ along with a copy of the decoded list of names. He prints it out and studies it, his eyes boring into the page when he lands on where Lydia’s and Scott’s names are typed across it, one next to the other. His hand clenches and the fragile paper bends and twists under the strain. He tries to suppress the urge to punch his crime board.

He attempts to calm his breathing and relax, closing his eyes to block out the world and allow himself the chance to think. He needs to lay out all the pieces and create a case before taking the information to his dad. Stiles’ eyes scan his bedroom before landing on his computer again and he squints as he considers the clipped, matter-of-fact nature of Lydia’s words. There’s no emotion there. No worry about the fact that she’s on this list with the second highest amount attached to her name.

She’s more than three times Kira’s amount. She’s worth five million more than Derek. Scott is a True Alpha, Kira is a katana-wielding thunder kitsune, and Derek is a strong werewolf from a distinguished family, and yet Lydia, who doesn’t have a complete grasp on her powers and can’t defend herself the way the others can, is, by his deductions, the second most lucrative target. People are trying to kill her for an enormous sum of money, more than he’d ever hope to see in his life, and Lydia’s not talking to him about it. She sent the same email to Scott, Kira, and Derek. It makes him feel disconnected from her, and that causes an ugly feeling to take root inside of him that he really doesn’t like.

He pulls out his phone and finds Lydia’s name second on his Favorite contacts list, but when his phone connects it automatically goes to voicemail. Stiles can't imagine her phone’s off after sending such a vital email, so that means she's talking to someone else. He hangs up and moves his thumb up to the contact at the top of the list, and discovering that Scott’s phone is the same— they're obviously talking to each other. Without him. The negative energy continues to flow through him, and he knows he can't relate to them in the way they can to each other right now, but  _he_  used to be the person Lydia came to about this stuff. Her talking to Scott instead probably doesn't mean much in the small picture, but in the big one— well. It speaks volumes about the current status of their relationship. It's not entirely a matter of trust, but of allowing herself to be vulnerable, and when Malia strides into his room unannounced five minutes later he thinks he has a hunch as to why he's not the first person Lydia wants to talk to anymore.

Malia has somewhat taken over the role in his life that Lydia had previously claimed. They’d hang out, they’d work on homework, they’d come up with theories for the crime board, it’s the same but it’s  _not_. They don’t fill the same spaces in his heart. He and Lydia weren’t together, but he and Malia  _are_. So why does it feel like he’s betraying Lydia with Malia? Malia’s presence in his life, in his  _room_ , might mean that Lydia doesn’t consider him as easy to rely on as before. He still  _wants_  to be someone she can rely on.

Later that night, Scott tells him it was Allison’s name that broke the code, and Stiles feels like a piece of shit. Lydia pushed him away around the time of the funeral, but he's been so caught up in dating someone for the first time that he's ignored the reality that Lydia needs him too. He doesn't know how to juggle Lydia and Malia, how to be a friend to Lydia without other feelings taking over, how to be a boyfriend to Malia without telling her about her true parentage. He doesn't know how to stop killers coming in and taking away all the people he loves in the name of greed. All he can do is lie everything out on his board and draw as many conclusions as he can, and if it means he buries his head in the sand regarding the terrible job he's doing of balancing his social life, then so be it.

\--

Lydia can see Stiles looking at her furtively from the driver’s seat every few seconds, worry bleeding into the atmosphere surrounding them. “Do you want me to take you home?” he asks, concerned.

She continues to stare at the road in front of them, the darkening sky looming over Beacon Hills in a heinous display of pathetic fallacy that would make her laugh if she didn't think it would result in her head hurting more.

“No. No, we need to get this. We need to figure it out. It’s all I can do.” She hates this. It feels like it always does. She’s constantly chasing after something that seems so unattainable. Her powers give her the ability to create the code, but she has to rely on chance in order to decipher it. She has the knowledge within her to help people, save them, stop this. But yet again, she doesn’t know how. It  _hurts_.

“Lydia.” That’s all he says. But there’s a wealth of meaning behind the way he says her name. Stiles can say a hundred things with just a certain inflection. This is him telling her not to blame herself, that she shouldn’t feel responsible.

“It is,” she argues, “I wrote the code. It’s up to me to find the cipher keys. Using Meredith is the equivalent of cheating on a test.” And Lydia Martin does not cheat. She’s supposed to be the smart one.

Stiles speaks softly, trying to diffuse her mental anguish, “She’s more experienced than you.”

“Yes, and she’s also in a mental institution,” Lydia says dryly. “Take a look at my potential future.”

His face pinches in distress at the thought. “Is it that bad?”

“Sometimes, yes,” she discloses. “My head is still ringing.” Lydia leans her elbow on the car door and rests her forehead against her hand.

“Would you like me to be quiet?” he murmurs. It feels like a match being lit under her skin, the way she can feel a little burst of flame and light at his consideration and how it’s reflected in the tender tone of his voice. No one has ever tried to help her with her powers like Stiles has, they simply don’t understand them and find it too much of a struggle to really delve into what she goes through. He’s always the exception.

“No, actually. Could you just...talk about whatever you want until we get back to your place?” Lydia asks hesitantly. She’s not sure when Stiles’ voice became soothing to her, but right now it seems like she could listen to him talk for hours and it would only make her feel  _better_. “And I’ll just close my eyes and listen. Is that okay?”

He shrugs, a gentle expression of surprise on his face. “Yeah, if it’ll help. I’ll try not to bore you to sleep.”

 _You could never._ Lydia closes her eyes and listens to him talk as he drives, twittering on about  _Star Wars_  in what he obviously assumes is content Lydia doesn’t already know. She doesn’t correct him and tell him she’s seen all of the movies. She’s been determined not to share that information with him even though he makes half a dozen references a day. Lydia has a reputation to maintain, and while she obviously finds fault with the improbable science of the series, she does enjoy them for their entertainment value. One day she’ll confess that to him and relish in the way his eyes light up, but not today. Today, Lydia’s just going to listen to his voice as it helps her heal.

/

As they enter Stiles’ house, Lydia’s about to walk straight to his bedroom when he places his hands on her shoulders and walks her further down the hall to the bathroom. “Before we get back into it, we’re cleaning you up, okay?”

She nods softly. “Yeah, okay.”

He sits her down on the closed toilet seat and grabs a cotton ball from the medicine cabinet. She watches the methodical way he moves, so focused and precise, so different from the clumsy boy that goes running into danger with nothing but a baseball bat. He comes into his own when he’s taking care of people and she doesn’t think he even realizes it. “Does it hurt?” he asks.

“Not so much.” Stiles dampens the cotton ball and kneels down on the bathroom tiles beside her with a glass of warm water. “Nothing long-term,” she adds.

He hums, taking hold of her chin with such a gentle touch that Lydia has to force herself to keep her breathing steady. Stiles tilts her head and dabs gently at the skin, wiping away the dry blood that trickled down the curve of her jaw. “She didn’t perforate your eardrum then,” he whispers, his voice bringing goosebumps to life over her forearms. He’s so close to her. So _so_ close.

Lydia shakes her head imperceptibly. “No, I think it was a defense mechanism. She was using her voice to push me away. I don’t think she really wanted to hurt me.” Lydia gets incredibly frustrated sometimes, so unknowingly demanding that she doesn’t realize how frightening that can be, especially to someone of more fragile sensibilities. When she’s come up against Oni, a Darach, and a Nogitsune, she sees herself as something so small in comparison that it doesn’t occur to her how overbearing she is to someone like Meredith.

“Well she did a fine job of that,” Stiles responds with indignance, brushing some of Lydia’s hair behind her ear as he stares at the cotton against her skin with rapt attention.

She reaches up and clasps his wrist, pulling his hand away from her skin gently. Lydia turns her face towards him, locking her eyes with his when she urges, “Really, Stiles, I’ll be fine.”

He plops the cotton in the glass and lifts himself up from the floor with a huff. “Twenty million bounty on your head says otherwise.”

“I don't care about that.”

“I do,” Stiles says thickly. He rests his hands on either side of the sink, arms tense as the veins swell ferociously. Lydia watches him turn his head to face her, Stiles’ eyes connecting with hers conveying such sorrow it breaks her heart a little bit. She has to avert her gaze. She doesn’t know what to say back to him. “I guess we’d better figure this out then, right?” He sounds almost impatient with her, like he wants to berate her for not caring about her own life in all of this. They’ve been here before, in his house, him telling her what her death would do to the people around her. What it would do to _him_. She knows. But there are more important things than her well-being here.

“We can do this, Stiles,” she says, rising from the lid of the toilet almost shakily. She walks the few steps to the bathroom door and looks back at him, nodding briefly as she tries to convey her need for him to help her solve this. If he wants her alive, he’s only getting it if they find the third cipher key. One step closer to stopping The Benefactor.

/

He knew from the second her face froze as she listened to Parrish on the other end of the phone what had happened. Meredith was gone. All he could do was wrap his arms around her and try and keep her from falling apart. She whispers against him, “Stiles, she…”

Pulling back from the embrace, he hushes, “Shh. Lydia, it’s not your fault, okay?” Stiles brings a hand up to the side of her face, rubbing his thumb along her cheek gently. “It’s not.”

A tear slips out of her eye, falling quickly from her eyelashes as her gaze drops. “But I-”

He moves his hand down to her jaw, pushing her downcast chin upwards until she's looking into his eyes once again. “Hey, Lydia, listen to me.“ Stiles needs her to look at him as he says this, she needs to hear every word. “I was in there. I know what it’s like. I wasn’t even assigned my room properly before I watched somebody do that to themselves. It is  _not_ your fault.”

“You...you saw somebody...?”

The memories fill his mind. Being in Eichen, not knowing if he was going to make it out alive, endlessly waiting to see if the Nogitsune would reclaim control of him again, was the worst experience of his life. He still remembers the sound of the man as he dropped in the stairwell, the reverberation of a neck snapping and a life ending so quickly that he didn’t ever have a chance to save him. He doesn’t even know what his name was.

“Yes. And they do a terrible job of taking care of people in that place, of giving them the help that they need. Please believe me when I say, this is not on you.” The last thing he wants is Lydia to blame herself for this. She didn’t kill Meredith. The torture inside Meredith’s head killed her. And the very thought that Lydia could end up like that someday almost makes his knees weak until he remembers that he has to be strong. For her.

Lydia shakes her head brokenly. “I-I’m meant to be helping people.”

Stiles moves his hands to her shoulders, gripping them as a reminder to her that she can use him for support. The way she says it. He’s just astounded by the beauty she holds. He used to think she was mesmerizing when he was younger, but this Lydia, the one that feels so much for other people, selflessly trying to save them— she’s breathtaking. “You’re trying. We have the whole list now. We know who we need to protect...because of you,” he insists. Stiles wants her to believe that she can do this; because he knows, without a shadow of a doubt, that she can.

“Thank you,” she sniffles, bringing a shaky hand up to her face to wipe away her tears. He stands there watching her take deep breath after deep breath, trying to regain composure before she sighs, “Could you take me home?”

Rubbing one hand against her upper arm comfortingly, he tilts his head, a displeased look on his face. Stiles doesn’t really want her to go home, not like this. “Yeah. Are you sure you wouldn’t rather just stay over?”

She backs away from him, picking up her handbag and avoiding his eyes again. “No, no it’s okay. You have the PSATs tomorrow.”  _Oh shit, he does._  “I need to just go home and sleep.” He nods regretfully, every nerve in his body not wanting her to be alone after the events of tonight. But he knows better than to argue, especially considering Malia will probably show up in the middle of the night like she usually does and that’s an awkward encounter he wouldn’t wish on his worst enemy.

\--

After the quarantine is lifted, her mother has to stick around to be interviewed by the police. Lydia walks out of the school and sees Mrs. McCall and Deaton bundling Scott, Kira, and Malia into their respective vehicles. She comes upon Stiles, stoic, bewildered and covered in blood spatter and her steps hasten to approach him. She stands in front of him but she can tell he’s not really seeing her, so she bites her lip and tugs him over to her car.

He’s silent the whole way home, just staring out the window apathetically and Lydia is worried, having never seen Stiles behave quite like this, not even when he was being tortured by the Nogitsune. When she pulls up to the Stilinski house, Stiles blinks sluggishly in recognition, the first sign of awareness Lydia’s seen from him since she found him. She unbuckles her seatbelt and walks around her car, opening his door and grabbing his hand, cold to the touch, tightly in hers as she drags him into his house.

Lydia sits him down at the kitchen table. She opens a few drawers until she finds one with a clean, dry dish towel and dampens it with warm water under the faucet. A parallel to the day before that she never would’ve expected would repeat itself so soon. They’re just teenagers— this isn’t supposed to be a routine that they become used to.

“You don’t have to-” he says hesitantly, the first words he’s uttered since she found him.

Lydia pulls one of the chairs closer, sitting in front of him as her knees fill the gap between his sprawled legs. “Yes, I do. You did the same for me,” she answers assuredly.

He shakes his head. “I’m fine,” he lies, eyes cast downward, “it’s the others who need taking care of.” He makes a feeble attempt to get up and Lydia presses her hand firmly against his shoulder, keeping him in the chair.

“Scott’s mom and Deaton have got them,” Lydia soothes. She’s not worried about the rest of the pack right now; they found the cure to the virus, they’re going to be just fine. Stiles, however, looks like his world is imploding. He’s traumatized. She heard the whisperings that someone was shot dead by the FBI. Lydia can put two and two together based on Stiles’ bloody t-shirt and haunted eyes. He was there. That he was who the deceased was targeting. “And you’re not fine.”

She grabs his chin in the palm of her hand and steadily rubs at the blood stains on his skin. Lydia wishes she could wipe away the events of the day as easily as she can the blood, wishes he didn’t see what he did. Stiles looks at her fully in the eyes finally, his tone glum, “I’m alive. That qualifies as fine right now.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

His whole body goes rigid. “I can’t. I can’t do that.”

She continues removing all the traces of red from his face, tenderly running the cloth over his temple. “That’s okay. I understand.”

After a few moments of silence, he asks her, “Did you feel it?”

“I knew someone was going to die, yes.” She averts her eyes and looks at the dish towel, turning it over in her hand to a clear space not yet discolored pink. Lydia remembers the feeling, and how certain she was that somebody in there was going to die. But she couldn’t tell who it was going to be. Holding the knowledge that her mom, Scott, Kira, Malia, and Stiles were all in the building, and that it could be any one of them or none of them, while she’d had to sit outside and wait, was torturous. She was so relieved to find out that the deceased was an assassin and not somebody innocent.

“I’m sorry,” he murmurs.

She smiles sadly. “You all survived. That’s a win.” Lydia brings the cloth to his neck this time, erasing the smattering of blood that’s dried above the no-longer-white t-shirt he’s wearing. Her breath becomes a little shallow as she realizes just how intimate this scene appears. The only tangible thing blocking her from caressing his neck is the cloth material, but then there’s also the dozens of internal walls and hurdles she’d have to get through to reach him.

“I’m not feeling very victorious right now,” he responds morosely. Stiles looks down and pulls the third list of the Deadpool out of his pocket, it’s crumpled into a ball. Lydia sends him a questioning look. “Malia knows.”

“Oh,” she replies, ears ringing like she's just been caught in the middle of an explosion. Malia knows Stiles didn't tell her about Peter. So his somber mood isn’t just from almost dying and watching somebody get their brains blown out in front of him, but also because his girlfriend walked out on him. She knows he had the best of intentions, but they all knew Malia would find out eventually. Lydia looks down, folding the dish towel perpendicularly until it becomes a small square marred with red and pink blemishes. As she gets up, she consoles casually, “She’ll forgive you.”

Stiles scoffs. “She hates me.”

Lydia rolls her eyes as she places the cloth to the side of the sink. The last thing she wants to be doing is giving Stiles relationship advice. “She’ll forgive you, Stiles. She feels betrayed, but she likes you way too much for it to end just like that.” Which is the truth, no matter how much she doesn’t want it to be. Lydia can’t falsely tell him that he should let Malia go. He  _likes_  her. She hasn’t done anything wrong to him. If Malia can’t get past the lie, and they do break up, maybe Lydia will get some satisfaction from it. She’s not an entirely different person after all; she still has selfish passions even if she can’t act on them as often as she’d like.

“Yeah?” he asks, and maybe she’s reading too much into it but it sounds almost  _optimistic_. Stiles wants Malia. She’s known that, but not once has she ever had to face it head-on in a discussion with him before. Personally, she never wants to again either.

With a small noise of agreement in her throat, Lydia answers, “She just needs time to process.”

“Thanks.”

“There  _is_  something I want to talk to you about though.” Lydia hikes herself up onto the counter, wanting to be further away from him than she was a few moments ago. She feels too fragile for that.

“Yeah, go ahead.” He waves a hand at her as a signal to continue and leans back in his chair, tension visibly receding in his body as he focuses on whatever he needs to help her with.

“So I took Meredith’s things to the lake house to see if I could contact her in some way. And there’s a photo of her taken inside that room.”

His brow furrows. “She’d been to the lake house?”

“Yeah. I think there’s something there.” It feels too important to be a coincidence. She can feel it in her bones that they need to look into it.

He rests his elbow on the table, placing his chin on his propped up hand. “Was your...could your grandmother have been a banshee?”

His thoughts align with hers. Peter’s attack on her awoke her powers, but she wasn’t turned  _into_  a banshee. It makes perfect sense if there’s a familial connection with her kind. “It would probably explain why I’m one. If it’s hereditary,” she replies.

“I definitely think you should check it out.”

Lydia smiles wryly. “Good. Because I was going to anyway.” Being able to still talk to him like this has to be enough for her right now. She can’t keep letting the dark feelings churn her up inside. It’s miraculous enough that he’s still alive, still part of her life. Even if it’s not what she wants and it’s not the same as it used to be— she still has him and he has her.

\--

Stiles lifts his dad off of the floor, helping him over to the couch as his mind spins fitfully with worry and anxiety. His dad’s been shot. He needs to get him to a hospital. It feels like he’s underwater and moving in slow motion— like all the sounds are muffled and unclear. Stiles shakes his head and the first thing he hears is the honeyed soft-spoken words of Lydia, apparently phoning for an ambulance. He runs his hands across his face and into his hair, tugging at the strands, hoping the dull pain will help him focus. They only came to update his dad on their theories, this wasn’t supposed to happen. They weren’t supposed to get caught up in an assassin that works on his dad’s payroll trying to burn Parrish alive.

“Ambulance is on the way, they should be here soon,” Lydia says gently as she brings a hand up to his shoulder and gives it a squeeze.

His dad winces, holding his arm still. “Thank you, Lydia. But what are we going to do about that?” He nods his head in the direction of Parrish, naked and covered in soot, and Haigh, face bloody and unconscious on the station floor.

Stiles looks out towards the scene with a scowl and then back to his dad. “Parrish can’t be here looking like that when they arrive.”

“Naked and burnt? No, he can’t,” the Sheriff agrees, a note of humor still present in his voice at the absurdity.

Lydia pipes up. “I can take him to Derek’s? We don’t know what he is, neither does he. Derek knows more about this stuff than we do.” It’s a good plan.

Stiles watches her for a moment, smashing his lips together, and then nods. “Good idea. I’ll call Scott and tell him to meet you there.” He reaches for his phone, but she pushes his hand back down and shakes her head at him. He sends her a confused look.

“No, it’s okay, I’ll do it.” She tugs him to the side of the room, lowering her voice in concern. They’ve been here before. Lydia knows how much it sends him reeling when his dad is in danger. For a split second, he’s back on that locker room floor, struggling to breathe and looking into Lydia’s eyes for salvation. His gaze automatically drifts down to her lips, watching as they curve around the words, “You focus on your dad, alright?”

He deflates. She’s giving him the opportunity to concentrate on just one thing— his dad. And she’ll handle the rest. Stiles wants to reach out and hug her but it doesn’t feel like the right time. “There’s no exit wound. He’ll probably need surgery.” He glances over at his father and the skin of his face feels tight with concern.

“He’ll be okay, Stiles. Don’t worry,” she urges, rubbing her hand across his forearm in a way that immediately soothes his fears. For a moment, all of the worst possible outcomes wash away from his mind like calm waves lapping at the edge of the shore. He brings his hand up to cover Lydia’s, her smooth skin like an anchor keeping him moored.

The smallest of smiles breaks out on his lips and he scoffs, eyes rolling. “Worrying is kind of what I do all the time, Lydia,” he answers mockingly. Her mouth curves up in an impertinent smile in response.

“I know,” she whispers softly. “But you can handle this. I can take care of the Parrish stuff.”

“Thanks.”

She shrugs lightly. “Just pulling my weight. Plus he’s already caught me looking for dead bodies before, it might help that I’m there if we have to tell him he’s supernatural.”

“Yeah. You better get him out of here.” Stiles looks furtively out of the window as if sirens will appear any second to blow their cover.

Lydia nods assuredly. “Got it.” She slides her hand out from between his arm and hand, his body immediately feeling colder without her. She looks like a woman on a mission, and his eyes are glued to her as she walks out of the office, adding, “Get well soon, Sheriff.”

“Will do, Lydia,” he says through gritted teeth, his eyes soft with appreciation. Stiles hurries back over to his dad’s side, rubbing a comforting hand against his uninjured arm. He can hear Lydia insisting Parrish finds a set of spare clothes because it would be wholly inappropriate for him to get in a car with her naked, not to mention the attention he’d get from being nude driving a law enforcement vehicle. Stiles and his dad look at each other, bemused chuckles falling from their lips. Stiles rests his head on his dad’s shoulder and waits for help. Lydia’s got this one.

\--

He picks her up from Derek’s on the way back from the hospital. He’s antsy, and his expression is stuck in a frown that she would love to be able to relieve in some way but there’s just too much to worry about and too many complications that stop them from being completely open with each other. It’s like there’s a shadow blocking out all of the potential light they could provide to each other.

They add the photo of her grandmother and Maddy to his board along with the new page of code before Stiles starts to sway a little on his feet. Lydia insists he try and get some sleep, and despite his immediate protests he eventually agrees but only on the condition that she stay over and they work on solving the key to the new code first thing in the morning. He offers her his bed and maintains that the couch is perfectly fine for him, telling her that he’s passed out there hundreds of times before, but all it does is make her wistful, wishing things were easier. She just wants to curl up in bed beside him and hear him breathing steadily as he sleeps, finally letting his mind rest. She wants to wake up beside him with his arms around her and finally feel like she has refuge from the precarious danger they always find themselves in. She wants to support him, and allow him to support her because she knows that with him next to her every hardship feels easier to get through.

Lydia sits at his computer for a considerable amount of time, typing up the code for the morning. The meticulousness of it almost relaxes her, reminding her of the way homework releases the tension in her muscles by exercising her mind. The destructive events they’re suffering through on a daily basis are taking a toll on all of them. Every time they try to get a handle on things, something else happens that they’d never be able to predict and sends them into a tailspin. Watching Sheriff Stilinski get shot, the worry etched on Stiles’ face— not to mention the confusion on Parrish’s face when learning about the supernatural for the first time— it all makes her feel brittle and on edge.

Once she has finally finished typing up the code and put his computer to sleep, Lydia quietly makes her way to the bathroom next to Stiles’ room to find the emergency stash of clothes she keeps at his place. Her bare feet pad across the Stilinski hall floor as she quietly makes her way to the kitchen to grab a glass of water, and she can’t help but stare at Stiles for a few minutes.

Her poor boy, who has always held the weight of too many problems on his shoulders. His face is all-too recognizable in his distress as he sleeps fitfully in the moonlight of his living room. And, despite the anxiety on his face, Lydia feels something settle inside herself as she watches him. Lydia’s compelled to reach a hand out towards him, and she carefully smooths her fingers along his brow, trying to dispel the anguish. He seems to respond to her touch, his unrest quieting as his expression becomes somewhat peaceful.

Despite the turmoil and despite the chaos, how much she feels for Stiles is very simple. Having him alongside her trying to figure things out still brings her peace. It still makes her gain control and power when she so often feels like she has none. She knows, without a doubt, that he’ll be able to help her figure out the key in the morning because that’s how they work. And even though there are layers and layers of emotional debris separating them right now, not even including the Malia issue, she still believes in him just like he’s always believed in her. They’ll be okay. They have to be.

He snorts a little in his sleep, snapping Lydia out of her deep thoughts, and she quietly creeps back to Stiles’ room so as not to wake him. When she finally settles down into his bed, she feels overwhelmed by the way his scent invades her senses completely. If she dreams of what it would be like for him to be there with her, his arms wrapped around her keeping her safe, then that’s no fault of her own. It’s his fault for making her stay.

\--

Parrish handcuffs Meredith and leads her out to his police car while radioing the station about what’s happened in Eichen House. Lydia pulls herself to her feet, trying to avoid looking at Brunski’s dead body laying on the floor in front of them. He tortured them. He was going to  _kill_  them. He killed her grandmother and made her listen to it. She  _hates_  him. Even if he wasn’t The Benefactor, he was still a sick and twisted murderer. And she doesn’t feel bad about his death. Lydia’s attention is drawn away from the dead body when she hears feet scuffing against the basement floor and ragged, frustrated breaths.

“Are you okay?” Lydia asks, her brow furrowing and she puts her hands on Stiles’ arms to steady him as he stumbles slightly.

Stiles huffs. “I’ll live. Unlike him.”

Lydia rolls her eyes at his deflection. “Stiles, I mean it. You don’t look so good,” she mentions worriedly. He wraps an arm around her back and holds onto her shoulder, accepting her help.

“That’s what a guy likes to hear,” he jokes, blinking dazedly. “I feel a little dizzy, I guess. My head hurts.”

“You probably have a concussion,” Lydia declares. As she begins to walk him out of the basement, he makes them stop briefly at the tape recorder, opening it with a resounding click and pocketing the tape.

“What are we doing about this?” Stiles wonders aloud, obviously trying to wrap his head around the new revelations.

Lydia looks up at him with a stern expression. “ _You_  are going to the hospital.  _I_ am going to the station. Meredith has to talk.” She won’t give up until Meredith tells them everything. She’s the key to putting an end to this once and for all.

“Are you sure you don't need to come too? He tasered you and was about to inject you with something lethal,” Stiles reminds her quietly, concern etched across his face as if he’s reliving it all over again. His hand drifts from her shoulder and up to her neck briefly, running his fingers ever-so-softly against her skin. There's a small twinge as he presses against the needle mark, but nothing more. The careful touch does make her heart skip a beat though.

“I'm fine,” Lydia dismisses. And she knows she’s not. This probably falls into one of the top ten worst nights of her life. The fact that that’s a list she can make is more telling than she lets herself dwell on. But she’s alive, and Stiles is alive, and they have a lead. That’s all she can ask for right now. “We need to know what Meredith says. If she's The Benefactor we need to know how to stop it before anyone else gets killed.”

“I know it's futile to tell you that you should rest,” Stiles smirks with tired humor, “but I'm gonna do it anyway.” His voice is soft and gravely, and it makes her ache. Lydia knows she could’ve lost him tonight. She wrote his name on that list for a reason. Having him with her, having him there as he tried desperately to distract her from Brunski’s torture meant  _everything_ to her. Lydia can still hear him telling her to focus on his voice and block out the sound of the tapes. The sound of her grandmother dying.

Even in the most dangerous moments, the most painful, the nights that change the fabric of their lives, he’s there— standing beside her, trying to do his best for her. She doesn’t know what she did to deserve him or why it took her so long to appreciate him. Whenever she’s in danger, he emerges as the one person who she can always count on to try and get her through it. He’ll protect her until his dying breath. It doesn’t matter how distant they’ve been, they always slot back into these roles. Endurance. Constancy.  _Love_.

Lydia smiles gently. ”Hypocrite.”

They reach the entrance to Eichen House and the ambulance is already pulling up. She sees Parrish talking to the paramedics about the evening’s events and he gestures to the facility. One of the paramedics looks over and sees Lydia and Stiles approaching, Stiles on shaky legs. She hands Stiles off to them, telling them she suspects he has a concussion.

She spots Meredith handcuffed in the back of the police car, a stoic look on her face, and Lydia’s mind whirrs, trying to make sense of it all. Of why Meredith would do this, why she would be responsible for so many supernatural people dying when she herself was on the list. Why she would turn up at the station with the intent to help Lydia when Meredith was the creator of the Deadpool.

“I’m coming back to the station with you,” Lydia declares to Parrish, who frowns.

“Lydia, you need to go to the hospital and get checked out,” he says.

“I’m fine, really. We need to deal with this quickly— before anyone else gets killed. I need to be there.” Lydia straightens her spine and shuts off the part of herself that’s exhausted, putting on a mask to hide the weaknesses that could be so easily exposed.

Parrish nods a little uncertainly and gestures to the passenger seat with an outstretched arm.

“Just a second,” Lydia responds and turns back around to face Stiles, who’s perched on the back of the ambulance.

He smiles boyishly at her, and he looks so young beneath the weariness. There's so much turmoil in their lives but sometimes Lydia just melts when she looks at him. When she's not frustrated and sad and suffocating in any number of other negative emotions, she just feels want. For him. For them.

“Take care of yourself, Lydia,” he says softly. She thinks he sees through the facade she put up while talking to Parrish.

Lydia looks down for a moment and nods gently. “You too,” she says, glancing up to meet his eyes.

She goes back to the car and settles in the passenger seat, looking at Meredith’s face imploringly as she does so but the woman just averts her gaze.

As Parrish drives them away, Lydia watches Stiles in the wing mirror until she can't see him anymore. And she hopes.

\--

When Lydia sees Malia appear next to Stiles via the video chat from the lake house, she knows what that means, but she doesn't let herself really feel it until later. Lydia is exasperated. And she knows she has no right to be. But being a better person doesn't mean she doesn't still get possessive and jealous, it just means that she internalizes the feelings instead of taking them out on other people...most of the time.

The Deadpool is over. So without that to focus on, Lydia gets a little swallowed up by her feelings. The worst part is that she doesn't have a problem with Malia or Stiles anymore. She's actually coming around to Malia as she finds her place within the pack, and she mentally applauds her for figuring out that there was a computer broadcasting the Deadpool behind the record player. She's pretty great. And Stiles is great. He's lucky to have someone that knows he's great. God knows it took Lydia far too long to realize that.

So Lydia decides to shut down that part of herself because the emotions she's feeling are pointless. Malia and Stiles are happy. And she's alone. That's how it is. That's how it's staying. The best she can do is block it out and be there for her friends.

\--

“You’re okay,” is the first thing out of Stiles’ mouth when Lydia answers her front door on the Sunday afternoon that they get back from Mexico.

“Well, you sent the cavalry after me, so yes. I’m okay,” she replies with an amused eye-roll. She looks safe and calm, and Stiles finally has the opportunity to feel the same after having to leave her behind and Scott almost being turned into a beserker and Peter trying to kill him and Derek almost dying and and _and_ …

“Do we consider Mason the cavalry now?”

“Well...he did his best with limited knowledge. I was really referring to your dad, who showed up with  _explosives_ ,” she says with awe. It makes pride swell in his chest that his dad not only didn’t get injured, but actually showed up and outsmarted a supernatural creature that they’ve not been able to defeat for months. Lydia waves him inside and he closes the door behind him before following her up to her bedroom.

“You didn't get hurt in the crossfire then?” He scans her shelf of books, fingers tracing the spines slowly as Lydia settles herself back onto her bed with her laptop.

Lydia laughs and Stiles turns his head towards her sharply with a cocked eyebrow. “You're gonna like this,” she smiles.

“Oh, please continue,” he says and moves across the room, hesitating for a second before he sits beside her on her bedspread. She spares him a glance as he does so, but she doesn’t protest, so he allows his body to relax a little.

“Mason and I charged at the berserker with baseball bats.”

Stiles physically feels the grin appearing on his face so hard that it hurts and he brings a hand to his chest. “I've never been so proud.” He wipes an imaginary tear from his eye when Lydia laughs, swatting his arm in response.

Her eyes narrow towards his wrist and she wraps her hand around his arm, bringing it closer to get a good look at it. She brushes a finger ever-so-gently against a red angry mark and asks, “What’s this?”

He pulls his hand away from her and back towards his body, the touch of her hand causing something unseemly to bubble beneath the surface of his skin that doesn’t feel appropriate considering he has a girlfriend. A girlfriend who just went to lunch with his father. A girlfriend he really likes. “Trust me, it's actually nothing. Dad handcuffed me to his desk because I left for Mexico against his explicit orders.”

Lydia chuckles. “Oh good, you deserved it then.”

“I did. Speaking of which, I'm totally grounded and shouldn't be over here…” he shrugs because the concept of disobeying his dad is not a new one by any means, “but I wanted to make sure you were good.”

“I am. Good.” Lydia nods.

“I really didn't want to leave you behind, y’know?” And even though he's talking about Mexico, it feels like maybe he isn't at the same time. He thinks she gets it because Lydia’s eyes are so big and so full of an emotion that he just can't place.

Lydia swallows and turns back towards her laptop, looking over whatever paper he's positive she's going to get an A on. Her flowing red hair catches the afternoon light and it makes his breath catch in his throat for a second. Sometimes her beauty hits him square in the chest out of nowhere and he can’t believe she’s real. “You should go...before your dad notices you've snuck out and extends your grounding til the end of senior year.”

“Yeah.” He lays his hand over Lydia’s for a split-second before he gets up and leaves. Something tugs at him all the way home like he's forgotten it and left it behind at her house— like he's being pulled into Lydia’s orbit and the further away he gets the less stable he is.

\--

“Scott and Kira not coming?” Lydia asks, pulling her sunglasses down as she squints up at Stiles, who picks up the book Lydia had placed on the sun lounger beside hers and tosses it gently into her lap.

Stiles rolls his eyes and smirks. “No, they bailed to go on a date. They wanted some ‘alone time’ before she goes off to New York.” He physically air quotes the words ‘alone time’ and Lydia chuckles softly.

“Hopefully it won't end in maiming and kidnapping this time,” she replies, pushing her sunglasses back on as she relaxes.

“They don't need that kind of track record,” Stiles adds as he plops down noisily onto the lounger.

“Liam and Mason?”

“Not sure, nor do I care. Were freshman always this annoying?” Stiles questions disdainfully.

“Yes,” Lydia answers simply, the corners of her mouth ticking upwards as she considers how erratic Stiles used to be.

“Hmm. I guess I remember it differently,” Stiles states as he pulls his t-shirt off and hangs it over the back of the lounger.

Lydia is thankful her sunglasses are very dark and Stiles won't be aware of the way her eyes wander over his exposed skin; the way her mouth gets wet and beads of sweat form along the back of her neck as she studies him. She may have overlooked this problem when she suggested spending the day out by her pool, or she just thought she’d be able to ignore it if the pack were here as a group. Lydia thinks for a moment, before reciting:

 

“ _O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us_

_To see oursels as ithers see us”_

 

“Translation?” Stiles asks, perplexed.

“‘Oh would some power give us the gift, to see ourselves as others see us’, Robert Burns,” she tells him.

“Isn’t that the guy who wrote Auld Lang Syne?” Stiles asks. Lydia hums in affirmation. He looks over at her openly. “What other people see you as can be far more terrifying than what you see of yourself, though.”

Lydia swings her legs off the lounger and faces Stiles, pushing her sunglasses up to rest in her hair as she reaches into her bag to grab her sunscreen. He mirrors her stance. “I disagree. You’re always your toughest critic. People can be cruel, but as long as you know whose opinions should matter to you and whose shouldn't…” Lydia shrugs gently, “well, those that see you know the real you." 

Stiles leans forward, resting his elbow on his knee with his chin in his hand and a cheeky smile on his face. “And what do you see?” She can tell he means it to be light and humorous, but there’s an undercurrent of insecurity in his eyes like she has the power to hurt him if she so wishes. Once upon a time, she might’ve done it.

She rubs sunscreen down her left arm and scoffs good-naturedly, “That you were a hundred times worse than Liam when you were his age.”

He looks indignant. “You didn't even know me then!” Stiles complains.  

“I…” she pauses, thinking it over. “No, I guess I didn't. Not really. I knew _of_ you. But you're right,” Lydia nods seriously. “I didn't know you.”

Stiles’ eyes flit over her face intently before coming back to her eyes. “And I didn't know you.”

Something twists deep in her gut. “You knew more than most.” She still remembers the winter formal, the things he knew about her that nobody else did. The way he stripped away that first layer of her hardened shell with his awareness of her secret ambitions. Lydia had always thought until then that he was only interested in her physically, that he’d built her up into some wet dream fantasy; she never considered that he actually found her interesting. He was a surprise. A welcome one.

He tilts his head, a serious look on his face that unhinges her a little. “Not enough.”

She blinks, recoiling slightly as she thinks about the meaning behind that. As she looks down at the slabs of concrete under their loungers, her manicured nails scraping along her forearm restlessly. “You know me now,” Lydia replies, disconcerted.

“Yeah.” It sounds unconvincing.

“What?” she asks nervously.

Stiles shrugs one shoulder. “You're still a bit of an enigma sometimes.” He leans towards her, and her heart stutters in its rhythm. Lydia’s plan to block out the way she feels because of his relationship with Malia continuously proves fruitless when the simple closeness of his body to hers makes her lungs or her heart react of their own volition. With an outstretched arm, he picks up her discarded book and places it in his own lap, studying the cover like he’s looking for a hidden meaning.

“If there's something you can't read, you're not meant to,” she states warily.

“‘ _There is only one page left to write on. I will fill it with words of only one syllable. I love. I have loved. I will love._ ’” He grins at her sheepishly.

Lydia can’t repress the shock on her face. She asks incredulously, “You’ve read  _The Time Traveler’s Wife_?”

“I’m full of surprises,” Stiles replies looking back down at the book as he runs a hand across the cover. 

She narrows her eyes at him. “So you saw the movie, cried, and then everyone said the book was better so you just had to read it?”

“Shhhh,” he whispers, raising his finger to his lips.

“You’re not denying it!” She laughs joyfully.

“You know I’m a sucker for sci-fi, Lydia.” He has the gall to wink at her.

Lydia scoffs. “Oh, it’s barely that. Just because it deals with time travel doesn’t make it science fiction, Stiles. It’s a love story. Your quote of choice is transparent.” She forgets what a romantic he is, but he’s just like her that way. They’re two people who are so logical and fact-based that, from the outside, people don’t realize that love is at the root of so many of their motivations. Stiles has watched his mother die and she has watched her parents’ relationship crumble and become volatile. They’re guarded with their hearts. It doesn’t mean they don’t beat just as strongly in the name of love.

With a wry smile, he passes the book back to her and admits, “But I did originally watch it for the time travel. My reputation stands.”

“Keep telling yourself that.” She smiles, dropping the book into her bag as she lies back down on the lounger again. When she’s finished with the sunscreen, she passes it over to Stiles, who thanks her.

It’s a wonderful afternoon with just the two of them; they lie side by side enjoying the tranquility that they so rarely get to experience. There are no monsters, no bad feelings ruining the mood. There’s just Stiles, Lydia, and a bright summer afternoon.

Stiles looks over at her after a while and says slowly, “So, as it’s just us...when can I throw you in the pool?”

She looks at him with disdain. “Never.”

Stiles laughs. “That word isn't in my vocabulary.”

“It is if you want to make it out of here alive,” Lydia threatens.

He watches her, expression sentimental, but there’s still a glint in his eye. “You don't scare me, Lydia Martin,” he teases.

A smirk spreads across her lips. “No?” she questions mockingly.

They stare back and forth for a few moments like cowboys duelling in the Wild West until he cracks and replies, “Okay, so maybe I'm lying.”

“Thought so.”

He does grab her and throw her in the pool sometime later to a chorus of squeals, which results in a pretty serious play fight and Stiles with a mouthful of chlorine because every time he opens it she splashes him. He dives under the water and comes up on her like a shark, dragging her under the surface until she kicks at him to let her go. It’s an afternoon full of memories that she’s always going to cherish.

\--

Stiles strides into the station with a brown paper bag in hand, but he stops abruptly when he sees a very familiar redhead scanning her phone beside Parrish’s empty desk. “Oh hey,” he greets curiously, “what are you doing here?”

Lydia looks up and smiles softly as a hello when her eyes catch his. “I was going through the bestiary with Jordan, trying to help him figure out what he is. He got called out to a traffic incident,” she explains.

“‘Jordan’ huh?” His eyes narrow, a knowing smirk on his face.

She tilts her head and cocks an eyebrow. “Parrish. You  _are_  aware of the first names of your father’s employees, are you not?”

“Yes,” Stiles replies, laying a hand on the desk beside her and looking down at the bestiary and the pages it’s open on. “I just didn't know you were.”

“We’re friends,” Lydia explains, standing up to bring them up to a more even height.

“As long as he's not doing anything to put his career in jeopardy,” Stiles adds inquisitively, and searches her eyes. He’s not sure that anything is actually going on, though he thinks there isn’t based on her reaction—  at least not yet. It’s not even really that he’s jealous. _Much_. God knows he has no right to be. Parrish is...fine. Good-looking, for sure, and he basically follows the pattern of her previous lovers but without being an obnoxious asshole. For some reason though, Stiles just can’t take Lydia being interested in Parrish very seriously. Parrish is...a little boring if he’s being honest. His mysterious supernatural diagnosis is the most interesting thing about him.

“What's that supposed to mean?” Lydia narrows her eyes and places a hand on her cocked hip.

Stiles ducks his head and lowers his voice. “You know what it means, Lydia. You don’t need a diagram.”

“Stiles, what are you doing here?” she asks tersely, avoiding the insinuation. Oh, she’s getting pissed at him. That’s... _interesting_. And hot. Definitely hot. His eyes catch on the angry blush on her cheeks and the way her jaw clenches in fiery irritation. Riling Lydia up is fun, but he knows he shouldn’t let himself get too lost in it. For just a moment, he wonders why he’s with Malia when Lydia makes him feel like  _this_. They’re incomparable. But things are easy with Malia. They work. And he can’t jeopardize that just because Lydia makes him feel like he’s crawling out of his skin in a desperate need to get closer to her whenever they’re around each other. Even if she’s not with Parrish, that doesn’t mean she’d want to be with him either.

He shakes himself out of his thoughts with a laugh. “Bringing my father dinner.” Stiles waves the bag in the air. “Is that a crime now?”

Lydia crosses her arms defensively over her chest, clearly annoyed. “Well, he's in his office. Run along.” She literally shoos him across the room in the direction of his dad.

Stiles raises his hands in surrender and does as she says, turning towards the office. But he can’t resist calling over his shoulder, “When you said you were done with teenage boys I didn't think that meant raiding the retirement home!”

“Stop being childish, Stiles,” she snarls. And it incites a ferocity within him. Maybe it was a low blow, maybe he shouldn’t have said it, but he did and he can’t take it back now.

“Oh, I’m being childish, am I Lydia?” Stiles retorts, turning around and stalking back to Parrish’s desk. He plops the brown bag on top of the bestiary heavily, the sound thudding in the quiet station. Fire burns behind her eyes as they sear into his. Stiles can feel heat spreading across his skin as the temperature rises. He crosses his arms across his chest indignantly.

“You are. Who I spend my time with has  _nothing_  to do with you.” There’s a flicker of something, a tell as she says that, but he can’t make out what the hidden meaning is. It’s like they’re playing poker and he knows she’s lying about her hand but at the same time she can still beat him if she wants to. And from the look on her face, she  _really_ wants to.

“We’re friends, aren’t we?” he asks deeply, trying desperately to keep his eyes on the upper half of her face. It would completely go against his point if he starts staring at her full, hot pink, pouty lips. _Crap._  “I’m making sure somebody in a position of power isn’t taking advantage of you.”

She purposely moves closer, lowering her voice so the two other deputies in the station can’t hear. “Who says he would be the one taking advantage?” Lydia murmurs, voice thick with innuendo and it makes a sharp pulse of arousal course through his body at such a high speed it makes him light-headed. She smirks up at him suggestively with dark and intense eyes that cause his brain to stop working.

“Huh. Thought I heard you kids.” His dad’s voice cuts through the heated silence and Stiles’ body twists quickly towards the sound. He gulps. “Stiles, get in here.”

He follows the order and forces his legs to move in the direction of his dad’s office. Halfway there he pauses, remembers his dad’s lunch and walks back to Parrish’s desk. To a stranger, Lydia would look completely composed, already sitting back at the desk and looking down at the pages of the bestiary impassively. But Stiles can still feel the heat simmering across his skin, and he sees the blush on Lydia’s neck too. She holds the brown paper bag up towards him knowingly with one hand but doesn’t stop staring at the book in front of her. He mutters a thanks and rushes back to across the station, not quite sure what just happened. All Stiles knows is that he can’t stop thinking about that interaction for longer than he’d care to admit.

\--

Lydia’s typing stalls as her phone buzzes for the third time in the last five minutes and she sighs, answering it and immediately putting it on speakerphone. “I'm busy, Stiles.” She continues typing, trying to focus on the words on her computer screen.

He scoffs indignantly. “It's the summer, how are you busy?”

She rolls her eyes. “I'm working on college applications.”

“Oh fun!” he exclaims, almost giddy, and Lydia’s brow furrows. They’re fun for her, but she’s an anomaly. Most people she knows are putting their applications off for as long as possible because they find them daunting or stressful. Lydia’s honestly been enjoying them. “Because that's exactly what I wanted to talk to you about,” he adds.

“It is?”

“Mmhmm,” he hums. “So what are your choices?”

She continues typing while she recites her options to Stiles, “MIT, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford…”

“Stanford!” he interrupts with a shout. Lydia stares at her phone, where his voice is booming from, with confusion. “Can we make that top of the list?”

Lydia feels annoyance crawling through her veins. “...There is no ‘we’ Stiles. You don't get a say on where I'm pursuing higher education.” He’s not her boyfriend. He’s not her boyfriend and he has no input on where she attends college. Lydia didn’t even get a chance to mention that she’s been looking into Oxford and Cambridge, so she might not even be in the country this time next year.

“No no, of course not. I didn't mean it like that.” He quiets and softens apologetically, quickly deflating.

Lydia picks up her phone and turns it off speaker, wedging it between her shoulder and her ear as she tries to get back into her applications. “Then why don't you tell me how you did mean it?” she asks.

“I just...I uh…” he stammers.

“Spit it out.” Lydia rolls her eyes. “And don't make a dirty joke.”

“Nah, too easy,” he replies with a chuckle. “I just want…” She can picture him fidgeting or pacing, moving around with nervous energy because the conversation happens to be a little too emotionally revealing for him. “I don't want us to be separated around the country, hundreds if not thousands of miles away from each other.”

“Us?”

“Us.”

Lydia raises an eyebrow. “As in...us all?”

Stiles is silent for a few seconds and Lydia can feel her heart beating harder in her chest. He exhales shakily. “Yeah, uh. All. Everyone. The pack. All of...us.”

She sighs and gives up on her task, falling horizontally onto her bed. He’s making it too hard for her to focus. Lydia lets his words percolate for a moment while she forms a response. She doesn’t want to keep being dragged under like this with no resolution. Again and again. At some point, she needs to get out of Beacon Hills and find a life outside of Stiles. She doesn’t want to leave him but she might have to.

“As long as we make it out alive, does it really matter where we’re going to be?” she questions.

Everything is quiet for a while, just the sounds of their breathing on either end of the line filling the air with tension. Lydia is so tired of wishing things were different between them. Her mind says one thing and her heart beats for another.

Stiles finally breaks the silence with a murmured, “I think so, yeah.”

And maybe he’s right. Maybe it does matter how far apart they are. ‘Absence makes the heart grow fonder’ has always seemed like an unrealistic proverb to her. Lydia doesn’t believe thousands of miles of separation will do anything but tear them apart. She can’t imagine her life without him. Even when it hurts he makes her heart feel full, makes the tips of her toes go numb, makes her skin tingle like the feeling she gets when she looks at twinkling lights on Christmas Eve. Anticipation and nostalgia abound. Lydia smiles softly and curls up, her eyes drifting over to the open applications on her screen. “Look, Stanford is on the list. It's a great school. I'm going to seriously consider it, okay?”

“That's all I ask.” And she can practically hear the grateful smile in his voice.

\--

[1 new voicemail from Stiles]

 _So, I know you’re probably not awake yet, but I wanted you to know that we were all here with you. I’m actually still here but they won’t let you have visitors and Mrs. McCall’s shift ended so I can’t even butter her up to sneak me in._  

_I’m so relieved you’re gonna be okay… Lydia, if I lost you… I don’t know what I would’ve done. Watching you bleeding out like that… I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t even think. I really thought you were gonna die, Lydia. And your priority was still to make sure someone else was alright._

_Just...you're not allowed to die, okay?_

_Scott’s mom said if Theo hadn’t made that tourniquet you might not have made it, so I guess I have to hate him a little less now. Maybe._

_I really don’t want to leave without seeing you but with everything that’s going on, we’ve got research to do about why Tracy didn’t follow the usual patterns and there were some guys in masks that Malia said she saw at the station. You need to get better fast because we’re gonna be totally lost without you._

_I’m just so glad you’re gonna be alright, Lydia._

_Okay, see you later._

[End of messages]

\--

Lydia tugs on his arm and turns around to face him, her expression laced with trepidation. His arms fall to his sides, feeling empty now they’re not wrapped around Lydia, anchoring her to him and keeping her safe. All he wants to do is keep them safe. Maybe he’d held onto her longer than he should have, but she _just_ got out of the hospital yesterday and they had been so close to getting caught, to coming face to face with those monsters.

Stiles is terrified all the time. If he thought he was anxious before, it’s nothing compared to the way his heart has been beating out of his chest since what happened last night. It has been less than twenty-four hours since he had killed Donovan, and everything feels like it’s spinning and whirring at a thousand miles an hour. His shoulder still burns and aches from the wendigo teeth. He can still smell the blood. He can still feel his hands wrapped around the metal pole as he prepared to take it out and he starts to shake with the memories. Stiles sighs and thumps his head back against the tiled wall.

“Hey, we need to go okay?” Lydia murmurs as she pulls at his arm again.

He’s terrified of _Lydia_. He’s terrified of losing her —  whether that be to another out of control chimera who tries to kill her, or to her finding out about Donovan and never looking at him the same way again, or even something as mundane as being separated after graduation. Everything is terrifying. Instead of Donovan behind his eyes this time, it’s Lydia on the floor of the Sheriff’s station bleeding out —  _dying_ —  while he stands there motionless. Slowly it morphs into Lydia looking at him with betrayal and disgust like he imagines she would if she knew he  _murdered_  somebody. He imagines her walking away from him like he’s a stranger and never talking to him again because she’s better off without him.

Stiles opens his eyes and steels his expression into something he hopes she can’t decipher. “We need to find out what happened to Scott and Kira.”

Of course, Scott and Kira. He nods and pushes himself away from the wall, and his hand moves to the small of Lydia’s back again. He guides them through the hallways of Eichen House with his head swiveling at every corner and every rogue noise made, waiting for something to jump out at them from the dark. “What are we going to do?”

“We’re going to ‘read the book’ apparently,” Lydia replies mockingly and Stiles almost smiles at her irritated tone before his face drops once again. He doesn’t feel like he deserves to smile. It’s like his skin is crawling; everything feels wrong and different and every time he closes his eyes he sees Donovan, pole through his chest, blood spluttering from his mouth, mercury pooling around his wound, his eyes staring into Stiles’ own as his life ended. He can't get it out. It feels like a cancer that is taking over his entire being, rotting him from the inside out.

They don’t find Scott or Kira in the building, but right as they get to the entrance they spot their crumpled bodies at the bottom of the steps. With worried glances towards each other, Stiles and Lydia rush forward.

“Scotty. Scott, you okay, buddy?”

Lydia props Kira up and the dark-haired girl slumps against the redhead, barely cognizant.

“We had some problems,” Scott tells him with a wry smile.

“This is  _not_  a productive method of relationship counseling, just so you know,” he jokes and Scott lets out a strained laugh as he helps him sit up.

Kira’s small, tired voice emerges from her exhausted body. “Because  _you’re_  such a relationship expert.”

Stiles’ mouth drops open in shock and Lydia barks out a laugh, her body shaking against Kira’s. He mutters an “Oh my god” under his breath.

“I like her when she doesn’t have a filter,” Lydia adds with a grin, and Stiles looks between each of his friends and feels infinitely better. For just a moment, it doesn’t seem like anything has changed. But they don’t know he’s harboring such a monumental secret that would change the way they see him. He can’t let them find out, they  _can’t_  know, because he can’t lose this. He knows it’s selfish—  every choice he’s made for what seems like months has been rooted in selfishness— but it’s only because he has things— people— that he can’t bear to be without. They’re the best part of him. Without them, he doesn’t know how far he’ll sink. He doesn’t want to see what kind of monster he’ll become.

“Let’s get you in the jeep,” Stiles says, helping Scott to his feet while Lydia does the same with Kira. It takes all of the energy he has left to put on a mask when Lydia keeps glancing at him while he drives them home.

\--

Stiles spots Lydia in her bright red floral dress at the end of the empty school hallway as she looks intently into her locker and he quickens his pace towards her. “Hey there.”

“Don’t look at me like that,” Lydia snaps in a low voice, pulling her books out of her locker and shoving them roughly into her bag. Her hair ruffles with the abrupt movements and she starts to look like the beginnings of a fiery explosion, ready to cause some damage, but Stiles hasn’t been afraid of getting burned for a long time.

He raises an eyebrow and leans against the locker beside hers. “Like what?”

She huffs. “Like I’m made of glass and I’m going to shatter any minute now,” she says tersely, and slips the strap of her bag onto her shoulder as she looks over at him pointedly.

“I wasn’t...doing that.” He avoids her eyes which he’s been doing all too often with everybody recently. Almost as if they look into his for more than a few seconds at a time they’ll be able to figure out the secret he’s keeping.

She slams her locker shut and strides past him. Stiles follows. “You were. And you’re going to stop. I didn’t actually faint, it was just the easiest lie to tell my mom.” One of her loud steps lands wrongly and Lydia stumbles, breath catching in her throat. When he stops to steady her, he notices, for the first time, the slightly watery look around the edges of her eyes.

Stiles puts a hand on each of her arms “Whoa, slow down.”

She shakes him off of her and continues her exit in a rush. “I can’t slow down, Stiles.”

He sighs in frustration and continues to follow behind her. “So if you didn’t faint that means…”

“I experienced a memory.”

It feels like his throat is closing up, fear taking hold in such an abrupt way that he struggles to get the words out. “Did the Dread Doctors-?”

With a shake of her head, she answers: “It wasn’t a memory about them.” It’s a relief because that could signify that they didn’t do anything to her. It could mean that Lydia wasn’t targeted by them. That she isn’t going to die like Tracy. And Lucas. And  _Donovan_. And anyone else from the various holes in the ground that they haven’t identified yet.

“I offered to take you home, but considering the fact we’re walking to your car right now and not mine I’m gonna assume that’s not where we’re heading.” They both get in Lydia’s car because, after what he’s just seen, there’s no way he’s leaving her alone to handle this. He wants to help and he needs a more proactive distraction than sitting in class and letting his mind flash back to the look in Donovan’s eyes over and over again.

“No, it’s not. I want to go back to the hospital. Maybe if I’m in the operating room again it’ll trigger something.”

“What was the memory you had, Lydia?” he asks gently, hoping that, despite her defensive attitude, she still considers him someone she can open up to.

Stiles watches her hand shake a little as she adjusts something on her dashboard. She breathes deeply a couple of times before telling him, “I was...about nine, and I was in Eichen House. I walked into a bathroom and there was my mom and my grandmother. She-”

“What?” he prompts.

Lydia gulps, blinking rapidly like she’s trying to disperse tears. “There was a hole drilled into her head. There was blood everywhere. My mom kept saying she told me to stay in the car...and my grandmother said ‘They’re coming, Lydia. They’re coming for all of us.’”

“Creepy premonitive declaration from a banshee, check,” Stiles adds sarcastically.

She glances over at him, her expression a combination of solemnity and exasperation over his inappropriate joke. “Stiles.”

He looks at her apologetically. “Sorry. I’m sorry you saw that... you were so young.” Stiles had never realized the trauma Lydia must have experienced when she was younger, but then again it was around the time he was so afflicted with grief for his own mother. He probably didn’t look for similar mourning in her eyes.

She shrugs a little. “Well, it’s a repressed memory for a reason. I didn’t remember it until now. I just stood there, staring at her and all of the blood. I didn’t know how to react. I’d never seen anything like that before.” Unlike now, when they see horrifying things all too often. They’ve seen so many dead bodies. Lydia’s actually  _felt_ people die and Stiles is haunted by his starring role in a murder. They were so innocent when they were children; they’d had no idea what life was going to throw at them. But, in a way, it feels like this path for them was inevitable.

They’re approaching the hospital, so Stiles reassures Lydia, “She wouldn’t have wanted you to remember her that way.”

“And I don’t. But it did make me think about Brunski again. It can’t have been long after that when he...when he killed her. I wasn’t much older when she died.” Lydia shakes her head. “I’m sick of innocent people dying, Stiles.” And it feels like a punch in his gut, guilt flaring up harshly that makes him feel nauseous as she turns off her car.

\--

Stiles feels like he’s being scrutinized with every second they spend scouring the woods for the bodies of dead teenagers. The more annoyed Lydia gets, the more he stumbles over his words and it becomes a cycle of bad energy. He’s lost count of the amount of times she’s suggested just going to Parrish and telling him the truth but Stiles just keeps brushing her off with weaker and weaker excuses each time.

“Why are we wasting our time on this?” she complains as she rests her back against a tree and shakes a stone out of her shoe while he puts a white ‘X’ on the tree above her.

“Are we going to go over this again?” Stiles sighs in frustration.

Lydia grabs a hold of his shoulder for balance while she puts her shoe back on and he automatically reaches out a hand to her waist to steady her.

“Do you remember what we had to do to find the Nemeton before, Stiles? Because I do.  _Vividly_.” She looks up into his eyes with that remark, and he does remember. He remembers her hands pushing him under the surface, the freezing ice water, the sixteen hours spent within his mind as he and Scott and Allison looked for the mystical tree stump. Stiles remembers the repercussions every night when he sleeps.  

He was so vulnerable then, and she became someone he could rely on to pull him through. Stiles wants to tell her. He wants to tell her so badly. It's on the tip of his tongue and lodged in his throat. _I killed Donovan_. That's all he'd have to say to start a discussion. Lydia would understand immediately why he doesn't want to go to Parrish in order to find the Nemeton. Why he’s been acting weird and shutting people out and why he can’t accomplish  _anything_ recently.

But he can't risk what could happen if he says those three words. Stiles doesn't want to see her face harden, her jaw drop slightly, her eyes change in the way they look at him. He feels more and more like a criminal every day. He’s covering things up to save his own skin and it’s like there’s a ticking time bomb over his head, just counting down the minutes and seconds until he loses everything and everyone in his life. If he loses Scott, he loses everything. Scott is the alpha, Scott is the center of their world, their moral compass, their leader. Scott is the one he absolutely and unequivocally knows won’t trust him anymore.

“You coming?” Her clear voice cuts through his internal suffering. Lydia has left her resting spot against the tree and has started walking off in a new direction. She’s waiting for him. As he unsuccessfully tries to shake himself out his self-destruction, Stiles hurries his pace to follow her.

He thinks maybe if he tells someone like Lydia, whose thought process relies on logic and facts rather than emotions and nobility, that he can figure out a way out of this. If she supports him and believes that he had no choice, then Scott might be more willing to understand. But the longer Stiles leaves it, the longer it feels like a betrayal. Everyone will wonder why he kept it to himself for so long. It makes him look guilty. It’s eating away at him and,  _god_ , he just wants to tell Lydia. But he can’t allow himself to.

Stiles watches her wrinkle her nose at a wayward plant, watches the way her hair dances down her back as she tries to find a clear path that they haven’t searched yet, watches the way her eyes blend with the thick brush that lines the forest.

He watches her and he knows that there’s too much to lose.

 _She’s_  too much to lose.

\--

As the sky begins to turn a softer shade of blue, Stiles speeds along the road to reach Kira as fast as possible. It’s almost dawn, and he’s just praying his jeep makes it through the dusty New Mexico desert. Conversation is starting to get easier between him and Scott now that they’ve cleared the air about what happened with Donovan, so he’s not surprised when his best friend wants to catch up on the inner workings of his life.

“So what happened with you and Malia?” 

Stiles sighs and lifts one of his hands off the steering wheel to run it through his hair. “She told you we broke up?”

“Yeah,” he affirms.

“It just...it wasn't right.” Stiles frowns and glances over at Scott with a small shake of his head. When he’d closed the door of Malia’s car, he’d closed the door on him and Malia. It hadn’t felt like they’d been in a relationship for weeks now, not since everything started up again. She’d still come to his house and sleep in his bed, but a wall had emerged and it was like two strangers lying beside each other more often than not.

Scott twists his body towards Stiles, open and eager to listen. “Are you sure that isn’t because of...everything that's going on?”

“No.” Stiles shakes his head again. “That probably had something to do with it but...no.”

“Then what is it?” he asks, intrigued.

“I care about her and I love her but not in the way that I should love her, y’know?” Stiles asks rhetorically. “It’s comfortable, and we’re similar in a lot of ways, but I  _know_  what being in love feels like for me and...I don’t feel it with her. I think I was just fooling myself, and Malia deserves better than that.” It’s the first time Stiles has really unpacked how he’s felt about his relationship with Malia since the breakup, and why it felt like it was falling apart long before he put the final nail in their coffin. There was an expiration date on them from the moment he saw Lydia lying on the station floor and realized—  _remembered_ — that losing her was the worst thing that could ever happen to him. It was only exacerbated by him lying to Malia about Donovan. He stopped letting her in and once that happened there was nothing left to salvage. It feels like a weight he didn’t know he was carrying is slowly lifting from his shoulders. Like he’s shedding the emotional baggage he’d been too busy to stop and sift through.

“Okay,” Scott says acceptingly. And that’s why he’s his best friend. Scott knows when to push, but he also knows when to just be a sounding board for Stiles’ thoughts. To let him know he hears him.

Stiles’ mouth twists uncomfortably. “She said she knew about Donovan.”

Scott quirks an eyebrow. “And that's bad?”

“No. But she didn't confront me. And she said it didn't matter to her,” Stiles summarizes. He’s barely been able to think about anything else since it happened and it’s been killing him. But it doesn’t  _matter_  to Malia. And that’s where their fundamental differences break their relationship in two. He needed someone to talk to. And yes, he should have told her, but he didn’t.  _Couldn’t_. He doesn’t blame her for not confronting him about it because it wasn’t up to her to do it. But it does  _matter_. He took somebody’s life and it feels like the most visceral change in the core of who he is. It’s something he can’t make better and can’t undo and he can’t see a future with someone that would just think it’s okay. That it’s  _normal_.

“Oh,” Scott breathes out. Stiles feels like he just said that all out loud, but even though he didn’t, Scott still gets it.

He stares at the road ahead of him, dust and heat seeping into the car through the open window. “She didn’t even know what happened, she just accepted it. It might not have been an accident and she would’ve been fine with that.”

“Right,” Scott responds. Stiles sees his best friend’s head drop in his peripheral vision, and he knows Scott understands. They were just talking before about how they thought Malia was the one most likely to kill someone, that she’s already plotting her own vengeance against her mother. But Malia spent years in the animal kingdom of kill or be killed, of killing as a necessity in order to survive. Scott and Stiles grew up side by side, too inept to even play lacrosse well, let alone take a life.

“That’s not...what I want. I don't  _want_  to kill anyone else. The fact that I'm capable of that? It  _terrifies_  me. I don’t want that to be something people expect of me,” Stiles admits, his hands clenching the leather of the steering wheel until his knuckles turn white and the material groans under the pressure.

“You know it’s not like that,” Scott comforts, his voice soft and sympathetic.

“I know, I know, self-defense.” Stiles rolls his eyes. “But I still killed him. He was a monster, but he was also a _victim_. I want to be with someone who pushes me to be better, not someone who allows me to be my worst,” he says sincerely. Scott knows him better than anyone, and he knows he can read between the lines. Stiles doesn’t have to say her name.

He chuckles gently. “I think that’s the most honest you’ve been in a long time.”

“Sorry.” His brow furrows.

“No, don’t apologize. We’ve all allowed what’s been happening to break us apart. We didn’t trust each other, or ourselves. Honesty is what’s going to fix us,” Scott states. And Stiles agrees. They’re not on even footing yet, but they’ve started the climb back to normality. They’re bringing Kira home today, and then they’re going to fix everything else. _Together_. As a pack.

“If we’re being honest, I still want to kill Theo,” he quips.

Scott smiles over at him. “Don't we all?”

Stiles grits his teeth when he thinks about that son of a bitch. “What he's done to my dad, you,  _Lydia…_ ” he trails off, voice cracking when he says her name.

Scott puts a comforting hand on his shoulder and gives it a squeeze. “We’ll get her out. Once we’ve got everyone, we’re getting her out.”

“Scott…”

His eyes soften. “Yeah, I know.”

\--

Stiles storms out of the animal clinic, and when he gets to the jeep he can't help giving one of the tires a swift kick accompanied by a groan of frustration (and pain, definitely pain). It’s as if the walls are closing in around him because they're _running out of time_. Lydia is in danger. And it's only going to get worse the longer they take and she’s helpless to defend herself from whatever sick and twisted things Valack has planned for her.  She’s going to die if this plan doesn’t work. He can’t let her die.

“Hey, hey,” Scott urges as he follows him. He puts his hands on Stiles’ shoulders to calm him down but adrenaline is still buzzing through his body and he can’t stay still. “We have a plan. We have a plan, okay? Lydia’s not gonna die like that. I won't let her.”

Stiles nods distractedly. “I'm gonna go talk to my dad. See if there's anything legally we can do before we break in like this,” he says hurriedly as he gets into the driver’s seat. His hands shake as he puts his keys in the ignition. “They're gonna kill her Scott. They're going to drive her so far out of her mind that she screams herself to  _death_.”

Scott settles in the passenger seat beside him, but he faces Stiles head-on conveying his sincerity and determination. “We won't let them. Drop me off at home, I'll get everyone there. You can join us after you've talked to your dad. We’re going in tonight and we’re coming back with Lydia.” Scott says assuredly. “I  _promise_ you.”

Stiles looks over at his best friend and nods, firm in his belief that they have the ability to do this. The plan is good. Not faultless, but it's the best they've got. Every nerve in his body feels on edge, desperate to see Lydia, to bring her home, to keep her safe. Stiles doesn't think he's ever been so scared in his life, but he has to focus. Lydia  _needs_  him to focus. She needs him to be there and save her. He’ll go out of his mind if anything happens to her.

\--

Scott picks Lydia up off the table in the animal clinic with ease and she grips his shoulder hard. She can hear the urgent footsteps of her mother and Stiles trailing behind them as Scott carries her outside. Stiles opens the door to the backseat of her mom’s car, his hand gently brushing Lydia’s arm as Scott places her down gently. Scott smiles at her softly, his eyes shining as he walks back over to Stiles and her mom, who are engrossed in a conversation she can’t hear. Life feels quiet for the first time in forever, and it’s such a relief that Lydia falls asleep for a few moments.

She wakes up to the door by her head opening. “Hey there. Scoot up, let me get in here,” Stiles whispers. Lydia sits up and Stiles gets in carefully, wrapping an arm around her as he nudges her to lay back against him.

Lydia stares up at him in puzzlement. “What are you doing here?”

“Your mom says I can come home with you,” Stiles says, brushing her hair back from her face and Lydia’s eyes flutter closed in contentment. It’s such a simple touch but it feels more openly intimate than he’s ever allowed himself to be with her before. “If that's okay?” he asks, suddenly unsure.

“Yes,” Lydia agrees with a warm smile lighting up her face. She finally feels at peace. She’s lost count of the number of times she thought she was going to die tonight, but she knows that Stiles came through for her every time. He refused to give up on her. And she almost cries when she thinks about all the times she wanted to force herself to give up on him.

She  _loves_  him.

She loves him and tonight is the first time she’s ever allowed herself to admit that. When she heard him on the other side of that metal door, trying to break through to her after she told him to leave her there and not come back— every emotion in her heightened to a point where she was able to break away from Valack’s torture, for her powers to flare into a single burst of defensiveness that would get her to see Stiles again. She forgot about the pain and all she felt was love.

Waking up to his face looking down at her, tears in his eyes and relief in his expression, it made her  _want_ things again. She almost died. She almost  _killed_ him. And it terrifies her that her power can be driven to the point where she could kill people and not be able to stop it. But Stiles brings her back. He  _always_ brings her back. And she  _loves_  him.

“You’re okay,” he murmurs reverently. Stiles can’t stop touching her. He runs his fingertips softly against the skin of her cheek and jaw absentmindedly as they just sit and breathe together, mentally recovering from the night’s trauma. As she relaxes into his arms more, his hand moves to trail up and down her arm comfortingly. Everywhere his hand touches feels like he's putting the pieces of her back together.

Lydia’s mom opens the car door and sinks into the driver’s seat with a heavy sigh. “Honey, are you sure you're okay?”

“I'll be fine, mom. Really,” Lydia assures her. And they drive back to her house in peace, Stiles’ body sure and solid against her, grounding her back to earth and settling her after days of endless pain. For once, it feels like she’s telling the truth. She’s going to be just fine.

/

“I need a shower,” Lydia complains when Stiles helps her up the stairs and into her bedroom.

He places his palms on her shoulders, massaging gently. Stiles has this need inside him to keep touching her, to keep reassuring himself that she’s really alive and safe and finally back with him. “Are you sure you’re ready for that? Will your head be okay?”

“I need it. I won’t be long, you can wait out here. I’ll call you if I need you,” Lydia insists as she brings a hand up to his wrist and rubs it firmly, letting him know she can do this. She shuffles towards the bathroom, giving him a reassuring smile as she goes, and he believes her. Stiles knows Lydia can do anything she puts her mind to even if he just wants her to get in bed and rest for a month.

While Lydia’s in the bathroom, Stiles goes back downstairs to get her a glass of water, needing to busy himself. The house is so quiet that he’d definitely still be able to hear her if she calls out for him. He runs into Natalie, sitting at the kitchen table nursing a glass of recently poured red wine, a tired expression on her face that he understands all too well— he’s seen it on his dad a million times.

“Sorry,” Stiles begins as he moves over to a cabinet, pulls out a glass, and fills it, “just getting her a glass of water,” he adds unnecessarily. The last few run-ins he’s had with Mrs. Martin have not gone well, first at the hospital and then in Eichen House. He doesn’t really know where they stand at this point. She let him come back to the house, but it’s been an emotional night for them all, so he doesn’t know if this is a one-off or a more permanent change of attitude.

“There’s Tylenol and Advil in the bathroom if she needs something,” Natalie replies stoically.

“Thanks,” Stiles shuffles from foot to foot awkwardly for a few seconds before he begins to make his way out of the kitchen.

“Is this my fault?” Natalie asks, regret lacing her voice.

Stiles turns around to face her. “No,” he answers, a sad smile curving across his lips. “You didn’t understand what was happening. I get it. If you’re not willing to see it, it looks like we’re the cause of everything.” Stiles casts his gaze downwards, staring at the water where it swirls slightly in the glass like a small whirlpool.

“It just seems like all of this started happening when you kids came into her life.” She frowns.

“Mrs. Martin, she can explain all of it to you,” Stiles responds, her words curling up around his heart and puncturing it like tiny needles. He hates that it seems to her like he’s been putting Lydia in danger. It’s the last thing he’s ever wanted. “Just know that everything I do...it’s with the intent of keeping her safe and alive. It always has been.”

“Yes. I… I think I’m getting that now,” Natalie agrees, a soft smile gracing her mouth as she looks over at him. It feels like things are thawing between them from what has previously been a very icy relationship. He thinks he has that effect on Martin women. It just takes them a while to warm to him.

Stiles smiles back gently, his hand holding the glass shaking slightly due to exhaustion and brittle emotions that he hasn’t quite recovered from yet. “I should…” he gestures towards the stairs and starts to leave again.

“You’re welcome here anytime, Stiles,” Natalie adds. “I’m sorry that I threatened to kick you out of Eichen.”

He ducks his head, smiling a little in relief before turning back to look at Mrs. Martin. “Thank you.”

/

Lydia hears the footsteps that are padding up the stairs and along the landing just before Stiles reappears at her bedroom door.

“Oh. I thought you'd left,” she says with a touch of surprise. It causes her heart to beat more quickly, joy spreading through her when she sees that he’s still here. She sits on the end of her bed. brushing her wet hair slowly and carefully to avoid the healing hole in her head that still makes her shudder to think about.

Stiles beams. “You know you can’t get rid of me that easily.”

Lydia rolls her eyes good-naturedly. “Apparently not.”

He places the glass on her nightstand before coming to sit beside her on the bed. “How are you feeling?” Stiles asks, placing a hand on her back that makes her sit up a little straighter, feeling more supported.

“Like I've been hit by a truck,” she replies, taking a hair-tie from around her wrist and slowly braiding her hair into a loose plait. “Honestly though, I'm going to be fine.”  _Thanks to you_ , she thinks.

He stands up again and leans forward a little, offering his hands to her. She reaches out and takes them and his hands close around hers, his thumbs rubbing against the back of her hands soothingly. She looks up into his eyes and loses her breath at the intensity she finds there.

“You almost weren't,” he breathes out resolutely.

Lydia stands up as well, and Stiles walks her to the head of the bed even though she’s perfectly capable of shuffling about by herself at this point. She likes it when he takes care of her.

“I know,” she murmurs. Lydia lifts up her arms and wraps them around his neck, pushing her frail body as close to his as she can. His hands settle on her back so firmly, pressing her even closer, until she can’t make out where she ends and he begins. It’s dark in her bedroom, but Lydia feels lightness surrounding them. It’s relief. It’s remedy. It’s  _euphoria_. That’s what he gives her. What they came so dreadfully close to losing. And she doesn’t know what she would’ve done if she’d hurt him. Lydia moves one of her arms, allowing her fingers to trail across the soft skin below his ear where he was bleeding earlier. “But you were really stupid, Stiles. I nearly killed you so many times tonight.”

“Makes a change that you would've done it by accident,” he jokes, and Lydia laughs softly. She can feel his heart beating so strongly against her chest, a constant reminder that he’s alive, and she’s alive to appreciate him. They got so lucky. Lydia can feel exhaustion taking over as her body sags against his, and Stiles chuckles softly beside her ear, sending a pulse of warmth into her stomach. He gently maneuvers her down onto the bed and there’s a moment where she just stares at him and he stares back, like neither of them can possibly tear their eyes away from each other for even a second. Until Lydia’s eyelids flutter as she gets drowsier and drowsier.

She crawls under the covers and Stiles perches on the bed beside her. “Here’s the thing though, I don't care.” He runs his fingertips carefully over the back of her hand, then her knuckles, then her fingers. “Lydia, I'm always going to be here. Dangerous or not, I was  _never_  going to leave you to die. It wasn't an option.” He says it so simply, so matter-of-factly. And, if her body didn’t feel ridiculously broken, Lydia thinks she’d sit up and kiss him. All she can muster the energy to do, though, is to grab his hand in hers and hold on tightly.

“Mmm.” Lydia sinks down into her own bed, a simple comfort that she had missed more than she knew, and blinks up at him. “Are you staying?” She really wants him to stay. The idea of being left alone with her thoughts, with nothing to distract her from the voices when her head is so vulnerable like this, scares her.

He shrugs, but she can see the need rolling off of him in waves. “I don't feel like letting you out of my sight,” Stiles breathes out longingly.

“ _Stay._ ”

“Yeah?” he asks in a light whisper, full of enough hope to make her yearn.

Lydia nods and gulps, choking back the tears she feels welling up behind her eyes. “I feel safer with you here.” She’s still getting used to being exposed with him. It’s like the dam has burst and all these feelings are flooding out of her while she tries desperately to hold some of them back, to plug up the holes. He makes her want to be brave. To let him take care of some of the emotion that’s spilling out of her. She saw his eyes when she woke up in the animal clinic. He’s just as vulnerable as she is.

Stiles kicks off his shoes and moves around her bed to lie on top of the covers beside her. Lydia turns her body so she’s facing him, and he reaches out a hand, nestling it underneath the one she has resting on top of the comforter, playing with her fingers in a way that makes everything else fade away. It’s just her and Stiles in the quiet of her bedroom.

“You’re safe. I’m right here,” he murmurs.

Lydia smiles softly as she looks at him, trying to hold off the tears pricking behind her eyes. There’s so much she wants to say, but she doesn’t know how to find the words. Heart hammering in her chest, Lydia picks up his hand with more bravery than she knew she was capable of when it comes to Stiles and studies the lines of his palm. Delicately, she runs her fingertip along his heart line. She pauses at the end of it, tapping twice quickly. Her finger moves to the center of his palm, tracing his fate line tenderly from top to bottom. At the end of that one she inhales softly before tapping out a pattern of twelve with varying pressure. Lydia feels like she can’t breathe as she finally lets her finger run along his life line, ending with another ten presses of her finger. She chances a quick glance over at his face, and he looks riveted but ultimately confused like he doesn’t understand the message. But then Lydia didn’t really expect him to.

She finally releases the breath through her lips, her eyelids fluttering before she tentatively pulls Stiles’ hand up to her lips, laying a soft kiss against the Mount of Venus next to his thumb. He sucks in a surprised breath beside her, but she can’t allow herself to look over at him. She’s too afraid of what she’ll find in his eyes. So she just holds his hand, two of her fingers pressed to his pulse point letting her feel the slightly fast pulse beating there, and closes her eyes.  _I love you._

When Lydia awakens the next morning, sun streaming in through her window like a new beginning, there's no Stiles to be found in her room. It’s like he was a beautiful dream. She can’t help but wonder if she pushed too far last night. She feels exposed, like she bared too much of herself in front of him. Maybe he’s not ready for her. Maybe that’s what his absence the morning after means.

She picks up her phone and sees a new message from him that reads:

[ _3:30 am_ ] Stiles:  _Had to leave, didn’t want to_ _—_ _following Parrish. Hope you slept well. Take care of yourself or I’ll have to come and do it for you. See you soon._

\--

Stiles grabs Mason’s medical file and closes it. “I'm gonna take this to Deaton— see if he has any thoughts.”

He starts to walk out of the Sheriff’s office and Lydia acts quickly to stand in front of him and block the door with her much smaller body. “Are you sure that's a good idea?” she asks with a frown.

“Yeah, why not?” he replies, body brushing against hers as he slides past her. There’s a small smile on his face as he moves that Lydia wants to smack off of him because now is  _so_  not the time. Things have been awkward between them today; it’s like they don’t know where to place themselves with each other after what happened that night after Eichen. She wants him, and she thinks maybe he wants her back, but there’s too much going on right now to have a conversation about it. It’s like they’re stuck in limbo, scared to move one way or the other.

Lydia follows him. “Are you forgetting that you're currently being threatened by the Desert Wolf?” And she promised Malia that she’d keep an eye on him. Lydia is not the same person she was even a year ago, her powers are stronger, Meredith showed her that. If he stays here and the Desert Wolf shows up, they can fend her off together. If he leaves and something happens to him, she’ll blame herself for not protecting him like he so often does for her. They look after each other— it’s what they do.

“I don't think I'm her top priority, Lydia. We need to find some way to help Mason, and this is likely the key.” He looks sure of himself, so confident, like he knows he’s going to be okay even though he can’t  _possibly_ know that. It’s borderline stupid. He has nothing to defend himself with. Even if he doesn’t run into the Desert Wolf, there’s still The Beast and the Dread Doctors out there.

“Do you want me to come with you?”

With a shake of his head, he answers, “No, stay here. I'll be fine.”

“If you're sure,” Lydia replies uncertainly. Usually, they do this kind of thing together, they don’t split up. But she’s getting a strong impression that Stiles doesn’t really want her to come. Maybe he doesn’t think she’s strong enough yet; after all, she’s not sure she is either. She screamed and she killed a man. There’s no telling what will happen next time she screams. The extent of her powers make her nervous, and she’s not sure whether she’s completely in control.

“I am. Don't worry.”

Lydia frowns as he walks towards the exit. “Who said I was worried?” she calls after him.

“Your face did!” he shouts back with a laugh. Lydia blushes as Deputy Clark gives her an amused and knowing look from behind her desk. Something about him disarms her and makes her melt in a way she’s not even aware is happening until she says something to expose herself.

Later, when Lydia feels an ominous sensation prickling beneath her skin, it’s not Stiles who’s in danger.

\--

“Is she okay?”

Fear spreads through his entire body, starting at the base of his spine and circulating up to his heart, down his arms and knocking the air out of his lungs like he's been winded. Lydia’s hurt.  _Again_. And he wasn’t there. Not that it sounds like he could’ve really done anything. Sebastien is incredibly powerful. But god, he’s so tired of Lydia getting hurt and he’s sick at not being able to stop it.

His thoughts disperse and Stiles’ focus comes back to his father’s voice on the other end of the line. “She’s going to be fine. She lost some blood and her vocal chords are a little damaged, but Melissa says she’ll make a full recovery. It could've been  _much_  worse.”

Stiles runs a hand through his hair agitatedly, imagining Lydia with her tiny hands pressed to her neck to try to stem the flow of blood from Sebastien’s claws and his dad rushing to get Lydia to the hospital as fast as possible.

“There’s not much worse than hearing that Lydia’s almost died for the fourth time since senior year started, dad.” It makes darkness swirl around inside him. It’s like some sort of sick _Final Destination_ scenario, every time he gets her back she almost gets killed again. He’s this close to wrapping her in bubble wrap and shipping her off to a tropical island.  _Hawaii_? She mentioned Hawaii last year.

His dad’s tone is comforting, certain, and that’s what eases some of the tension in Stiles’ muscles. If it was really bad, he’d know it. “Look, she didn't want to speak much in case she made things worse, but she did ask for you.” Stiles closes his eyes and exhales deeply. Lydia  _wants_  him there. And every piece of him is screaming to get to her as fast as possible.

If Lydia wants him, she has him. She always has.

“I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

Scott moves towards him and grabs his shoulder reassuringly. “You okay?”

“Sebastien slashed Lydia’s throat,” Stiles answers, even though he already knows Scott was using his werewolf hearing to listen in on the conversation.

“Yeah.”

Something suddenly occurs to him. “I don't think she’ll be able to say Mason’s name.”

Scott shakes his head. “We won't worry about that right now. What matters is she's alright. And that she's asking for you.” He smiles at Stiles with barely repressed optimism. Stiles thinks Scott wants them to get together almost as much as he does.

“Yeah,” Stiles ducks his head shyly. Lydia’s asking for him. If fifteen-year-old Stiles could see him now he’d be screaming ‘ _Go go go! Lydia Martin is asking for you! What are you still doing here?_ ’

“It's Lydia,” Scott says simply.

“It's Lydia.” He nods. It’s _always been_ Lydia.

Scott grabs his shoulders and pushes him out of the animal clinic. “Come on, we've gotta go. You don't wanna keep her waiting, dude.”

\--

The Beast is gone. Mason is back. And they’re all safe and accounted for until Malia calls Scott and tells him that while they dealt with the Desert Wolf, Stiles got caught in the crossfire and they’re taking him to the hospital with a pretty large shard of glass lodged in his chest.

Lydia walks into the hospital room to find Stiles shirtless, a gauze dressing right beside his heart. She hurries her footsteps towards him, and his head shoots up, a warm smile crossing his face and eyes softening upon her arrival. “Are you okay?” she croaks, not remembering her own injury until the words have already left her mouth.

Stiles takes one of her hands in his. “Hey, be careful. You've already pushed your voice to the limit today.” There’s a pride in the way he says it, and she can’t help her small smile at his tone. Because yes, she did that. She saved Mason even when they all thought she wouldn’t be able to. And Stiles saved Malia. Things ended pretty well for them this time.

Choosing not to speak again, because she knows Stiles will just tell her to be quiet anyway, Lydia traces the edge of the dressing, eyes flicking up to his to try and convey the question she’s asking.

He looks down at her fingers on his chest, and she swears she feels the breath stutter in his lungs. Stiles’ eyes move back to hers and he answers, “Honestly, I'm fine. It's superficial.”

A tilt of her head. She’s unconvinced.

Stiles rolls his eyes exaggeratedly. “A few stitches.”

Lydia taps along the edge of the gauze, pushing him to further expand on that answer. She wants the truth and she’s not stopping until she gets it.

“Nine. Nine stitches. They gave me some morphine for the pain.”

She shakes her head. “We’re a mess,” she rasps.

His hand shifts from holding hers and travels upwards, wrapping around her wrist and then grasping her forearm lightly. She stares at his sure fingers against her skin, heart skipping a beat at the feeling of certainty it brings her. The simple touch of his hand just...destroys her, changes her, gives her something to fight for. It makes every nerve-ending burn with a white-hot brightness that she never wants to lose.

Stiles pulls her towards him slowly, and Lydia’s hand that was previously toying with the edges of his bandage ends up pressed solidly against his chest. He leans forward and presses his forehead against hers. “But we’re alive,” he murmurs. “Sebastien’s gone. The desert wolf has slunk away with her tail between her legs. And we’re okay.”

Lydia stares at his collarbone, and then her eyes trail along the soft skin of his chest, counting the moles littering his body. She's too scared to look up into his eyes, too overwhelmed at what she might find there. As her gaze follows the lines of his frame, her attention is drawn to an asterisk-shaped scar on his right shoulder. Lydia cautiously brushes her fingertips against the mark, one she's not sure when he received, and Stiles tenses, backing away from her slightly, the moment ruined.

“Sorry.” She catches his eye. That's...something. Something he hasn’t told her about. If it was nothing, he wouldn't have flinched. She can't imagine by the look of it that it hurts, it seems weeks old. Which means there's an underlying reason for him to react so badly towards it— it comes with bad memories.

“Scott mentioned something about you falling? That Theo paralyzed him and he had to drop you?” It’s classic Stiles avoidance, changing the topic away from himself to somebody else. But she’ll bite.

“I’m fine. I promise,” she says gently. They were so close before that they could've kissed. If she’d been brave enough, she could've finally felt his lips on hers again. It's been so long.

There's a sharp knock on the door and in pops a smiling Mrs. McCall, a small bag in her hand. Stiles and Lydia spring apart awkwardly, and she can see Melissa trying to suppress a chuckle at their behavior. Stiles reaches for his shirt next to him with a wince and gingerly puts it back on. Lydia slinks out of the room while Mrs. McCall tells him the instructions of the antibiotic ointment for his wound, but it feels like she's left a piece of her heart with him as she walks back down the hallway of the hospital.

\--

Stiles enters Lydia’s room as quietly as he can just past two A.M. on a stormy night in Beacon Hills. There’s a report of suspicious activity that he’s worried about and wants her to check out with him, but when he finds Lydia, she’s tossing and turning in her sleep, clearly disturbed by whatever’s haunting her dreams. Stiles rushes over to her bed, keen to wake Lydia in the gentlest way possible. He reaches out to hold her hand and whispers her name carefully, but her response is to simply scrunch her forehead in distress. He kneels down beside her bed, getting closer, and murmurs, “Hey, Lydia. Lydia, wake up.”

She shoots up, so startled that she almost headbutts Stiles in the process, but he backs away quickly, continuing to rub her hand comfortingly as his other hand comes up to rest on her lower back. Lydia breathes heavily, becoming aware of her surroundings, and she looks down at his hand in hers, following his arm until her eyes connect with his and she sighs in relief.

“You okay?” he whispers, concern etched over his features.

“Y-Yeah,” she stutters and tugs on his hand. Stiles moves up to sit beside her on the bed and wraps his arm around her waist. Lydia exhales, relaxing against him as her breathing slows to a steady pace.

Stiles toys with the lacy hem of her top where it rests above her hip and asks, “You want to talk about it?”

Lydia turns her hand over in Stiles’, threading their fingers together like she’s gaining support from the connection to him. He moves even closer to her, pressing his chest against her arm. There’s not a single inch separating them. “It was Valack. I was back in Eichen house.” Stiles squeezes her hand for encouragement. “Of all the things I thought I was capable of...killing somebody was never really one of them,” she admits somberly.

He releases a long, drawn-out breath in response, and Lydia turns her head towards him. “Me too,” he confesses quietly, as if the less noise he makes, the less true it will be. She looks at him with intrigue, her eyes imploring him to explain. “Did you see that scar on my shoulder? After we defeated The Beast?” Stiles asks. He knows she did, but it feels safer to pose it as a question, to ease in slowly.

Lydia nods gently, worry written across her face as she glances between his covered shoulder and his face. “You can tell me.” Lydia looks up at him in the darkness of her room, the wind howling outside her window. “You can _trust_ me, Stiles,” she adds with more conviction, her voice caring but firm. It gives him the security he needs to finally come clean.

Stiles looks down at their intertwined hands, finding it easier to look there rather than in her eyes. “Remember when you noticed me wince because of my shoulder before we went to Eichen about the book?” He sees Lydia nod. “The night before I was in the library and I fell asleep. When I was about to go home— Donovan, the guy who threatened my dad— attacked me. He was a chimera— part-wendigo— and he grabbed my shoulder. That’s... that’s the mark. I ran back into the library to hide but he found me and I… I tried _so_ hard to get away, Lydia. I started climbing the scaffolding and he just kept coming at me, he wouldn’t stop, and I pulled this pin at the top and a bunch of these metal rods fell down...” Stiles breathes heavily, too scared to see Lydia’s reaction. It’s like he’s reliving it all over again. Every moment is burned into his memory and he knows the scar will never fade.

“He died,” Lydia fills in, and Stiles clenches his eyes shut, the vision of Donovan staring at him, covered in blood, causing a tear to leak out of Stiles’ left eye.

“Yeah,” Stiles says, voice full of fear and regret.

Lydia brings a hand up to his cheek, wordlessly encouraging his eyes to open and connect with hers. She uses her thumb to gently wipe away the single tear traveling down his pale face. Her eyes shine back at him sympathetically, glistening in the dark. “It’s not your fault,” she insists. “I  _promise_  you, it’s not.” He feels some of the tension in his chest release as her words wash over him. And the way she’s looking at him— like nothing’s changed. She doesn’t look at him like he’s a monster. Someone terrifying and dangerous. Lydia looks at him like he’s Stiles, flaws and all.

“Valack isn’t your fault either, Lydia,” Stiles vows. “You couldn’t control yourself. He was  _killing_ you.” He thinks his heart breaks a little when he remembers how close he came to losing her that night. Valack deserved what he got. He drove this mesmerizing, intelligent, wonderful girl out of her goddamn mind all in the name of finding out who The Beast was. It makes Stiles feel nauseous. If he’d gotten there a minute or two later...

Lydia brushes her thumb against his skin again in a feather-light touch, and he almost thinks for half a second that she might kiss him because she's so close and he feels so connected to her right now. It's like they’re on the edge of a cliff and neither of them are willing to take the leap for fear of not making it to the water below.

She pulls her hand away from his face and scoots across her bed before laying back against her pillow. Stiles hesitates for a moment before Lydia rolls her eyes humorously and flicks them towards the pillow next to her, a sign she wants him to follow suit and lay down. Stiles chuckles and kicks off his shoes before joining her. Lydia beams at him as she curls her hand into her pillow.

“Thank you for telling me.”

“I wanted to tell you before,” he murmurs, staring across at her fondly.

Lydia tilts her head inquisitively, “When?”

“When we were in the woods looking for the Nemeton.”

Lydia thinks about it for a moment, a slow realization crossing her face. “That’s why you were so anxious.”

Stiles laughs gently. “As opposed to?” His nerves have been shot for years due to the supernatural. He’s been perpetually anxious the entirety of senior year and with good reason.

“Slightly less anxious,” Lydia replies, a teasing smile on her lips that Stiles loves. His heart feels so full when he looks at her; she’s everything he’s ever wanted and their relationship now is closer than it’s ever been. It’s like they’ve finally found their way out of the darkness that was holding them down for so long.

“You haven’t asked me why I’m here by the way,” Stiles mentions, tugging the covers higher onto Lydia’s shoulder. Her eyes soften at the gesture.

“Tell me then,” she pushes, waiting for him to explain.

“Suspicious activity near the woods. I was gonna ask you to come check it out in case it was supernatural,” he explains, biting his lip as he waits for her rebuttal. Stiles thinks he already knows the response he’s going to get.

Lydia rolls her eyes. “Not happening. I’m not going out in this weather, even for you.” Stiles can’t help the grin that breaks out on his face when she says that— as if he’s an exception to her rules, that he holds more weight in her decision-making process than other people do. “Stiles, there isn’t always going to be something going on, sometimes you can just relax.”

“No, I can’t,” he admits honestly. He wishes he could. Stiles knows he’s obsessive about this stuff, that he’s always lying in wait for the next threat. But if he lets his guard drop and doesn’t see something coming, he could lose someone before he even has a chance to formulate a plan. Stiles  _has_ to protect them all.

“You’re gonna make yourself sick one of these days,” she says sleepily, reaching out a hand towards him.

He places his hand on top of hers and threads their fingers together where their hands lie between them, lightly caressing her little finger with his thumb.

“Worth it,” he whispers as he dozes off to the sound of Lydia’s soft breathing and rain pattering against her window.

\--

With a purpose she rarely lacks these days, Lydia strides into the New Year’s Eve party fashionably late and more dressed up than she’s had a chance to be in months. Acting like a normal high-schooler feels alien to her at this point— normality has become fighting for life and against death. She glances around looking for her pack members and, as if on cue, Stiles exits the kitchen, drink in hand.  

He stops dead in his tracks as soon as he comes face to face with her.

“Oh wow. You look amazing.  _Wow_ ,” he says stupefied.

Lydia can’t repress the way her lips curl up into a grin. “Hello Stiles,” she greets, biting down on her bottom lip coyly. Lydia doesn’t dress for men anymore; she dresses to feel good about herself. The slack-jawed expression she’s receiving from Stiles’ is simply a  _much_ welcome bonus to the effort she had put into her look.

Stiles blinks. “Wow,” he repeats, his eyes glazing over.

She chuckles gently and walks a little closer to him, taking note of the way his grip tightens around the cup in his hand. “You already said that,” she murmurs coquettishly.

“It bears repeating,” he replies in a low voice, eyes scanning her face and then her chest briefly before they come back to meet her eyes. He raises an eyebrow flirtatiously. It makes Lydia feel feverishly warm, like the heat of his gaze is causing flames to lick at her skin.

“Are you drunk?” she asks with a knowing smile. Lydia doesn’t get to see him intoxicated very often, as he’s usually too worried about letting his guard down and being vulnerable to attacks. A drunken Stiles produces some _interesting_  results.

Stiles shrugs and nods. “I may have had a considerable amount of alcohol, yes.”

Lydia reaches out and curls her fingers around his wrist. “Is it time to cut you off?”

“Am I saying things I wouldn't say sober?” he questions, eyes narrowing at her playfully like he has no recollection of any words that are coming out of his mouth. She thinks he’s playing it up a little, that he’s not nearly as drunk as he’s pretending he is. He hasn’t fallen over yet, at least.

Her lips curve into a smirk as her eyebrows raise. “You’re getting there.”

He nods profusely in response, facetious with his sincerity. “Then yes, cutting me off is probably for the best.”

It’s like there’s no one else at the party to him, his eyes literally glued to her. Lydia feels like something could happen. There’s electricity buzzing in the air between them, but she’d rather not feel like she’s taking advantage of a less-than-levelheaded Stiles.

“Acknowledged,” she says, moving her hand down from his wrist to the cup and prying it away from him. “And thank you.”

“You're welcome.” Stiles stares at her dazedly. “What am I being thanked for?”

Lydia rolls her eyes at his lack of attention span. “For saying I look amazing.”

He leans a little closer and Lydia’s breath gets caught in her throat at the intensity in his eyes. “Oh. Well, that's a given. You're Lydia.” He smirks. God, it would be so easy for her to just grab him and kiss him and  _fuck_  the consequences, but it doesn’t feel like the right time.

It never feels like the right time.

“Right.” She coughs, breaking his gaze as she shuffles her weight from one foot to the other. She looks around the party and sees a couple of people watching them with interest, ready to gossip and spread their newfound information around the party and the school.

“You want a drink?”

She nods. “I'll come with you.”

“Nobody else to hang out with?” It’s a leading question. Stiles not-so-subtly asking her why she’s choosing to spend her time with him rather than look for her other friends. The answer is simple— because she wants to.

“Why wouldn't I be hanging out with you?” she replies.

He shrugs. “No reason. You just see me all the time.” They get into the kitchen, which is blissfully empty and has considerably less background noise than the hallway had. Stiles leads her over to the drinks table.

“This shouldn’t come as a shock to you anymore, Stiles. I spend time with you because I like you.”

“Mmm,” he hums. Stiles reaches into a cabinet and grabs her a wine glass rather than one of the styrofoam cups and she smiles in curiosity. “I like you too, Lydia.”

She hitches herself up onto the kitchen counter, dress hiking a couple of inches higher and exposing more of her upper-thighs. “So why did you get so drunk?”

Stiles gestures finger guns towards her and winks. Lydia bites back a laugh. “It is my night off, Lydia Martin.”

He leans down to a lower cabinet, making a disgruntled noise when he can’t find what he’s looking for. He crouches down and whoops as he grabs something from the back. It’s...her favorite wine. A red Zinfandel that she adores, and that Stiles apparently took the time to hide away earlier on in the evening so that she’d get her drink of choice when she arrived. Lydia doesn’t remember how he knows that, but it makes her squirm against the countertop nonetheless, heat spreading all the way to the tips of her toes as she kicks her feet a little.

“Your night off?”

He pours her a glass of the wine, only spilling a drop or two before handing it to her, their hands brushing together in a way that sends a little electric buzz dancing across her skin.

“From the supernatural.”

“Stiles, nothing’s happening,” Lydia insists for what feels like the thousandth time this month.

He points a finger at her as he rests his hip against the counter. “Yet. Nothing’s happening yet. It will.”

“We don't know that. Stop obsessing.”

“I am.  _That's_ why it's my night off!” he tells her jocosely, swaying a little.

She places a hand on his shoulder to stop his drunken movements. “And you had to get drunk to shut your mind off?”

He nabs the cup she’d grabbed from him in the hallway and walks to stand opposite her, elbows on the island. “Well, sex isn't on the cards so alcohol seemed like the next best thing,” Stiles admits, finishing off the drink in one long swig.

Lydia cocks an eyebrow with interest. “What’s stopping you from having sex?”

His jaw falls a little bit, and then he gestures his empty cup like he’s toasting her. “Lydia, not sure if you're aware of this, but I don't have a girlfriend.”

“And... you have to have a girlfriend to have sex?”

Stiles’ face twists as he thinks about it, perhaps a little too deeply for his level of intoxication. Lydia takes a sip of wine and waits, more impatient than she’d care to admit.

“...I mean...no.” His eyes catch hers. “But I'm not interested in a random hookup.”

She has to repress the urge to smirk. “No?”

“No. Definitely not.” The intensity between them makes the room feel muggy and sweltering, like they’re standing bare in a sauna of their own making. It’s a struggle for her to catch her breath and Stiles looks similarly affected. He’s only a few feet away from her but it’s too far for her liking.

“Me either,” Lydia confesses, crossing one leg over the other. Stiles’ eyes leave hers to stare at her thighs just like he did a million moons ago when he caught her  _indisposed_ with Aiden in her bedroom. Nothing changes, and despite everything they’re still right here, on the cusp of something more, waiting to see who’ll blink first.

“Really?-” he asks with awed enthusiasm, but before he can finish his thought Stiles’ arms slide along the island as if he’s literally about to collapse and he knocks one of the cups off and onto the floor, spilling alcohol everywhere. “Oh shit.”

At that opportune moment, Liam strides into the kitchen with Hayden in tow and proceeds to slip dramatically on the booze, flailing like something out of a cartoon before he lands face down on the tile.

“Oh my god!” Hayden shouts, quickly trying to pick her beer-soaked boyfriend up.

“Fuck! Sorry, Liam!” Stiles apologizes, but he ends up doing some flailing of his own, and instead of helping Liam up he kicks the beta in the crotch.

“Yeah, whatever,” he grumbles, and Hayden drags him back out of the kitchen, casting a glare in Stiles’ direction in the process.

Lydia remains in a state of shocked silence for a few more moments before she starts laughing so hard it fills up every inch of her lungs. She puts a hand in front of her mouth to try and calm herself but it does little to cover the loud giggling and wheezing noises that she just can’t seem to stop. The ridiculousness of the situation just keeps replaying in her mind whenever she begins to compose herself and the laughter bubbles up within her again.

“That's nice,” Stiles breathes out, eyes soft as Lydia’s laughter finally subsides.

“What?”

“Hearing you laugh. It's nice.” His eyes trace over every inch of her face, and it feels like he’s seeing right down to her core, appreciating every piece of her with just the caress of his gaze.

“You’ve made me laugh before,” she points out, suddenly feeling shy.

He smiles gently. “Yeah.” Lydia wants to kiss him so badly when he continues, “And it was nice those times too.”

She looks down and blushes. “Oh. Thanks.”

There’s a sharp trill, and Stiles slides his phone out of his pocket, reading a message. “Yeah. I should probably go find Scott.”

“Okay,” she agrees, refusing to let her disappointment show like so many of her other emotions do when she's around him.

“Catch up with you later.” He walks closer to her, giving one of her hands, where it’s resting on the countertop, a soft squeeze before he departs.

“Mmhmm,” Lydia hums, watching him leave as the loud sounds of the party fill the air for a moment before the door swings shut behind him and Lydia is left alone. She feels cold without him already, but as she picks up her wine, the wine he specifically kept separate for her benefit, a smirk appears on her lips as she takes another sip. He _remembers_ her.

Part of her wishes she’d get the opportunity to kiss him at midnight even though it's such a tremendous cliché. But as the hour approaches, Lydia finds Stiles passed out on the couch, dead to world and the rowdy partying surrounding him. Somebody has drawn a dick on his forehead and Lydia definitely takes a photo of it to show him later. Maybe it's not exactly the way she would've liked to start the year. But as she sits next to the boy whose mouth is hanging open, as she sits next to the boy and whose limbs are akimbo, as she sits next to the boy she _loves_ , it feels like enough for now.

\--

He’s ripped out of the driver’s seat, her hand shaking in the air where he was holding it seconds ago.

 _Remember. Remember. Remember_. Lydia tells herself to remember him. She  _needs_ to remember him.

On autopilot, she slowly opens the door to his jeep, the parking lot completely silent other than her boots clacking along the ground as she walks slowly towards her car. Lydia can hear the whimpers in her throat. She feels cold as the chill seeps into her bones and catches on the tracks of her tears as they flow uncontrollably down her cheeks. It’s like she’s trying to think but her mind feels cloudy. She needs a plan. What’s the plan?

/

Lydia doesn’t know how she got home. Nor does she remember what she was doing beforehand. When her eyes catch sight of herself in her vanity mirror, she’s stunned to find she looks a wreck. Her makeup is smudged to hell and there are tear tracks, still slightly damp, all the way down to her chin. Her head is pounding, which she thinks means there was sobbing involved, but she has no recollection why. She hasn’t cried that hard since Allison died. It doesn’t make any sense. She feels...lost.

She takes a shower, hoping it will open up her mind and cleanse whatever hurt her this deeply. But it just leaves her feeling more confused and...wrong. Something feels so deeply  _wrong,_  and she feels an uncomfortable mix of desperation to fix it and the exhaustion of experiencing it in the first place. Lydia wipes away steam on the bathroom mirror and stares into her eyes. She feels different. And not in a good way.

When she’s ready for bed, she grabs her phone and studies it, expecting to find a message. It’s just silent. There are no new messages. And that irks her, but she doesn’t know why. It’s becoming a trend that that makes nausea build up in her gut. She wakes up periodically throughout the night and checks her phone over and over again, but there’s no change. No messages. Lydia doesn’t know what she’s searching for, but whatever it is, it’s not there.

/

The headache she had subsides by the morning, but there's still a faint layer of confusion, of loss, that she doesn't know how to comprehend. And as she walks through the entrance to the school, hears the click of the doors, the chorus of chatter— it's like a chill flows down her spine as she stares at the smiling students before her. There's something she was supposed to remember, but it's  _just_ out of reach. It's not a feeling Lydia’s ever felt before but she knows she feels wrong. And the aching inside her doesn't leave.

If anything, it gets stronger.

\--

Stiles looks down and sees his car keys in his hand, clenched tightly in his grip, grooves and marks on his palm like he’s been holding them for far too long. And bit by bit he becomes more cognizant. He knows there's no reason for him to be in a train station, knows there's no destination for him that makes any sense. Stiles would never leave without his friends. He’d never leave without  _her_. Lydia. In the jeep. Telling him that she wouldn’t leave him and wouldn’t forget him.  _Please, Lydia_ , he thinks.  _Please remember me._

The last person he wants to be stuck with is Peter, but at least he's trapped with someone that has some knowledge of the supernatural. Someone he can bounce ideas off of in between wanting to murder them. It keeps a fire burning within him, a desire for the pack to prove the asshole wrong and figure out a way to save him. Save everyone.

When the old woman beside him asks him who he's going to see, he smiles gently and says ‘no one’. Because there's no one he wants to see other than the redhead he left behind in his car, who he finally,  _finally_  told the truth. He told Lydia he loves her. And that moment— it keeps him hopeful. Because Lydia Martin is a miracle. She's not just a girl, she's smart and incredible and powerful and beautiful. So completely magnificent that he still can’t believe she’s actually real half the time. He knows that if anyone has the ability to bring him back, it's her. There's a reason why she didn't forget him at the same time everyone else did, and she's tenacious, she won't stop even if everyone is telling her to. When Lydia believes in something, she can achieve the impossible.

Stiles knows she loves him back. He can tell. He knows what it feels like to be desperate to keep the person you love safe and alive like he knows the back of his hand. And that feeling, which he had thought belonged only to him for  _such_ a long time, was written all over Lydia’s face when she looked at him before he was taken.

She loves him too.

When faced with losing the chance, nothing could have held him back from saying it anymore, and, if given the opportunity, nothing will hold him back from saying it again. He loves Lydia Martin. And he’ll be damned if he doesn’t get the chance to have the life he’s always dreamed of with her.

\--

Every night she wakes up at the same time. 1:37 A.M. Every night, she hears his voice in her dreams. The voice she  _knows_  belongs to Stiles. When they managed to radio through to him, Lydia had felt a resurgence in her determination. She’s  _right_. And he loves her, and she loves him, and she’s going to do everything she can to bring him back to her.

She doesn’t remember what he looks like, but she knows how he makes her feel. He’s like clouds clearing and the sun finally shining, the warmth making her feel alive. He’s like early mornings curled up in bed during the winter, cozy and comforting. He’s like fireworks on the Fourth of July, brightening up the dark sky, the loud bangs pulsating through to her bones. Stiles is worth it. He’s worth the effort and the pain and the doubt from everyone else. He’s worth it all to her.

Most nights it’s the same routine. Leaves blowing about outside the school. Stiles’ voice telling her to run, not to look at them, not to forget him. Telling her to remember that he loves her. Sometimes she’s running away with him, almost able to feel his hand in hers even if she can’t see him. Sometimes she’s sitting in his jeep, eyes closed, and she can hear his voice so clearly beside her. _He loves her, he loves her, he loves her._  She repeats it like a mantra whenever she hits a dead end.  

But sometimes...sometimes when the tightness in her chest gets too strong Lydia wakes up, grabs the keys to the jeep that she always keeps close by, and drives to the school in the middle of the night. Sometimes she just sits in the driver's seat, wishing and praying that Stiles’ voice will appear over the radio once again. She wants to hear the man she loves. She’d sit here and talk to him all night if the damn radio would just connect to him again. Lydia wants to know that he’s still safe, that he still remembers her back.

One morning she wakes up to Scott nudging her gently, a concerned expression on his face. Lydia looks back at him sheepishly as she sits up, squinting in the early morning light as she tries to work the uncomfortable crick out of her neck.

“What are you doing here, Lydia?” he asks, but it seems like he already knows the answer.

“I fell asleep,” she mutters, avoiding his eyes as she pulls the visor down, checking how she looks in the mirror. There are dark circles under her eyes and her hair looks like she woke up in a hedge. She doesn’t even want to think about her attire.

“That wasn't my question.” Scott places a comforting hand on her shoulder.

Lydia shrugs. “I don’t know. I guess I just feel closer to him here,” she answers.

“Yeah. I know what you mean,” Scott agrees, flicking switches on the radio to no avail.

“I wish we remembered him properly. I wish I could picture him,” Lydia muses. She runs her fingertip across the dashboard, picking up some dust that she rubs away. Dust that shows how long it’s been since he’s been in this piece of crap.

Scott smiles over at her gently. “We remember what he means to us.”

“What time is it?” Lydia asks, realizing her phone is still in her car across the school parking lot.

“‘Bout a half an hour before school starts. Maybe you should take the day off? Go home?” he suggests.

Lydia gives him a wry smile. “You mean I shouldn't attend class in my nightwear?” she replies sarcastically. “I haven’t had much of a scandal yet this semester. I’m certainly due for one.”

“I think naked in the woods still trumps school in your pajamas, Lydia.” Scott grins.

“I peaked in sophomore year? Sixteen-year-old Lydia would be so disappointed in me,” she laughs. Laughing in the jeep without Stiles makes her feel hollow though, and the smile quickly fades from her face, replaced by a slight frown.

“Hey, we’re gonna get him back,” Scott promises, noticing the change in mood.

Lydia reaches towards him, and he meets her halfway, taking her hand in his. “I really hope so. Because if we don't, it's just going to be me, Scott. And I don't want to be left here alone.” She looks out across the parking lot, and even though school hasn’t started yet, there are still fewer cars than there used to be at this time of day. She notices. Things are getting worse.

Scott squeezes her hand reassuringly. “You won't be.”

Lydia gives Scott a hug, taking strength from his unwavering hope and confidence. They both love Stiles. Malia does too. And they’re going to do everything in their power to save him from the Wild Hunt. She doesn’t want to end up like Lenore, dependent on a ghost for company. Lydia’s already haunted enough.

When she arrives back at her house, she feels some kind of force pulling her towards one of the books on her shelf. She slides it out and runs her fingers across the cover, trying to figure out its significance.  _The Time Traveler’s Wife_. She opens the novel, immediately finding one of her favorite quotes:

 

_He vanishes unwillingly, without warning. I wait for him. Each moment that I wait feels like a year, an eternity. Each moment is as slow and transparent as glass. Through each moment I can see infinite moments lined up, waiting. Why has he gone where I cannot follow?_

 

A teardrop lands on the page before Lydia even realizes that she’s crying. She sniffles and puts the book on her nightstand, a yearning inside her to reread it after she’s washed away a night spent waiting in Stiles’ car just like Clare waits for Henry.

Later on, when Lydia’s reading through the novel, she can hear Stiles’ voice reciting the words “ _There is only one page left to write on. I will fill it with words of only one syllable. I love. I have loved. I will love.”_  And she gasps at the faint memory.  _I love._ Remember _I love_ you _._

\--

“You did it. I knew you could do it,” he whispers against her lips. Lydia’s lips. The lips that he can finally kiss whenever she wants him to because they’re _together_. He’s never needed to kiss somebody so much and now that he’s started he kind of doesn’t ever want to stop. If their first kiss was special enough that it was able to reunite them, he’s going to make a thousand more memories that Lydia can remember him for.

“Did you? Because I didn’t.” She laughs, voice cracking. Lydia keeps touching him like she’s reassuring herself that he’s actually, really here. And Stiles _gets_  it. God, does he get it. He had thought he was only gone for a few days, but he’s been trapped over there for  _months_. Stiles kisses her cheeks, her nose, the corners of her eyes that crinkle upwards with a smile big enough that it makes his heart rate rise and all of the color become dramatically saturated. Lydia Martin is a miracle.  _She’s his miracle_.

“You’re Lydia Martin, you can do anything.” He punctuates those words with another soft kiss to her lips that causes Lydia to melt against him. His hands clench against her waist, pulling her body as close to him as he can until there’s no space between them. There’s been way too much space for  _way_  too long. Every time their lips brush, Stiles lingers longer and longer, giving in to his undeniable need to stay suspended in the moment forever. They were so close to not having this. He ran through the rift that he previously watched kill somebody because he trusts Lydia with his life. She brought him back, so the least he can do is kiss her until she forgets about her troubles.

Breaking away with a soft exhale, she buries her head in his chest and Stiles wraps his arms around her, hugging her close. They should go, this is the final showdown, they have to stop everyone being wiped out by the Wild Hunt— but Stiles has been waiting for this moment his whole life. He has to bask in it for just a moment longer. Lydia wants him, she loves him, she eviscerated a supernatural rift to bring him home. She makes every goddamn fight and feeling of anguish and moment of torture worth it. She’s all he’s ever wanted.

He hears muffled words against his flannel and pushes Lydia a few inches away from his body. “Mind repeating that?” He laughs. 

“I said you smell terrible,” Lydia admits, beaming up at him like it doesn’t even really matter to her.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” he mocks, “didn’t really have time for a shower the second I got out of the Wild Hunt.”

She shrugs a shoulder with a teasing smirk. “Well, I guess I have to make do.”

Stiles nods. “Terrible sacrifices must be made.” And he bends down to kiss her again, Lydia smiling into his mouth with so much joy it makes his heart feel stupidly full, bursting with all of the love he’s felt for her since his eyes caught sight of the beautiful red-haired girl in his third-grade class. Their love can achieve impossible things, that’s how deep it runs through their bodies. Stiles is going to cherish it and keep it safe for the rest of his life.

\--

“Stiles.”

“What?”

“Stop looking at me and read the textbook,” she says sternly, not even glancing up from her own book. Lydia hasn’t heard him turn a page in at least ten minutes and she’s been able to catch him staring out of the corner of her eye when she turns her head a certain way.

“Nah, I’m good,” he replies comically.

Lydia can’t resist a smile as she looks back at him, her intention to argue falling away when she sees his lovestruck expression. “Stiles,” she tries.

“You can keep saying my name but it won’t make a difference. This is my ‘looking at Lydia’ time.”

She chuckles lightly. “No, it’s  _studying_  time.”

“‘Studying Lydia’ time then.” He smirks. “Oh, I like that idea better. It gives me more options.” Stiles jumps up from his desk chair and throws his book haphazardly on the table, striding over to where she’s laying on his bed with such a purpose it’s like she can already feel his hands on her body before he’s even reached her.

Stiles takes the book out of her hands and folds over the corner of the page before tossing it on the floor, a perfect juxtaposition of consideration and carelessness. He kneels down on the bed, placing a hand firmly on Lydia’s waist as she twists her body and lifts up to meet his mouth. It starts out softly, with Lydia breaking the kiss repeatedly because she just can’t stop smiling. Stiles is nothing if not persistent though, and as things get more heated he pushes her down until she’s lying under him, her legs entwined with his.

“Hi,” he murmurs sweetly, placing a couple of gentle kisses on her jaw that make her sigh in happiness.

“You said hello to me when I got here an hour ago,” she replies, amused, one of her hands gripping his bicep and the other trailing upwards until it’s buried in his hair.

Stiles hums. “Now I’m saying hello to you properly,” he declares, planting more kisses on her neck until he sucks desperately on her pulse point and Lydia gasps, a sharp jolt of desire coursing through her body so abruptly that she has to actually remind herself to breathe. Lydia grips harder on Stiles’ hair and he moans so sexily that she really just wants to throw him down on the bed and have her way with him. But, unlike him, Lydia has a semblance of patience and restraint, and Stiles has made it clear that she’s the center of attention this afternoon. She wants to see where his plans take them.

It’s not the first time they’ve done this, but every time is just a little bit different. More confident, more exploratory. They love harder and more passionately as they become comfortable with expressing their feelings through their bodies. Their touches become less unsure, more experienced. It never loses its magic like it did with the other boys that have explored the plains of her body. It actually seems as if things get brighter and better every time, until her heart is so full of Stiles that she doesn’t think she could possibly fit anything else within her. He’s all over her, both physically and spiritually. She may as well have his name branded across her heart. It’s never going to belong to anyone else anyway.

Lydia takes it upon herself to wrap her leg around his hip, pressing her heel into his ass, pulling him closer until his growing arousal is flush against the juncture between her thigh and crotch. She smirks in satisfaction and thrusts her lower body upwards a little, causing her boyfriend to release a guttural groan right below her ear.

“You don’t play fair,” he whispers, nipping at the cleavage spilling over the top of her shirt.  She can’t believe they’re still fully clothed at this point.

“Where would be the fun in that?” she teases, quirking an eyebrow as he looks down at her. There’s too much energy flowing through her body for her to be passive.

Stiles tugs her blouse out from the where it’s tucked into her skirt and places his palm solidly against her stomach. The heat of his palm makes her feel gooey and warm, like butter melting. And his hand is so big, covering so much of her skin that it seems like she’s locked down against the bed, but in a way it’s also freeing— as if he’s protecting her while her heart is soaring to unimaginable heights.

“Are you happy, Lydia?” he asks, and she feels naked when he gazes at her, so much seriousness in his eyes that she doesn’t know what to say.

“Am I happy?” It seems like an absurd question. It’s hard to comprehend and her mind, previously flooded with lust now feels dull and cloudy as she tries to make sense of what he’s asking. Such a simple question, but such a heavy weight behind it. The emotion pouring off of Stiles seems raw, like he’s thinking things he shouldn’t be.

“Are you happy...with me?” His eyes trace over her face, deliberate and pensive.

Lydia’s hands grip hard onto his shoulders, dragging him closer towards her and holding on for all she’s worth.

“Immeasurably,” she breathes out, pulling him down so she can kiss him long and deep. She runs her tongue along the inside of his lower lip, drinking him in before she bites down gently. Lydia’s thumbs rub against the apples of his cheeks tenderly. He has to know. How can he not know?

“Lydia,” he mutters.

She grabs the collars of his flannel in both hands, keeping him close so she can look into his eyes for what she’s about to say. “Stiles, I’ve never been good with words. Not the emotional ones. But I’m telling you, with not an ounce of uncertainty in me, that you are who I want.” One of her hands comes back up to his mouth, her thumb caressing his bottom lip. “I’ve wanted you for so long, and I’m going to want you always. I promise.”

“Yeah?”

She nods emphatically as the light returns to his eyes. “I love you. You make me happy. I didn’t know I could  _be_  this happy.”

He beams and it’s like the sun has come out inside his bedroom on this spring afternoon when they were supposed to be studying so he can graduate and they can get the hell out of this town. Lydia’s heart bursts when he looks at her like that, and it’s so much emotion that it almost physically hurts. She wants him to look at her like that forever.

“God, I love you so much.” His voice cracks and then he laughs and Lydia laughs and it’s just _perfect_.

When the laughter fades, there’s a beat where they just stare at each other, and then it’s like someone has flicked the switch. They dive towards each other’s mouths, kissing with fervent desire. Lydia tugs at Stiles’ flannel so hard the buttons strain and pop, springing free and scattering all over the bed with one or two falling to the floor.

“You ruined my shirt,” he murmurs between kisses as she slides it easily down his shoulders. Stiles’ hands leave her body for a moment as she pushes it the rest of the way off and tosses it across the room— she pays attention only long enough to see it land dramatically over his computer monitor.

“I’m not at all sorry,” Lydia says raspily, wrapping one hand around his neck, the other gripping his shoulder as she tugs him back on top of her roughly. It knocks the breath out of her lungs but she doesn’t care. He’ll be her oxygen.

Stiles holds onto her hips briefly, shifting her body beneath his into a more comfortable position. He then maneuvers his hands underneath her blouse, the heat seeping into her back as his fingertips tease along her spine. He applies pressure, pushing her up towards him as he moves back slightly. Lydia’s arms wrap tighter around his body, keeping herself pressed against him as close as she can. Stiles hums happily, slowly dragging her blouse up up  _up_  until Lydia has to let go of him in order for it to slide over her head, but one of his palms remains supportive against her spine so she doesn’t fall backward onto the bed.

He stares at her with such wonder in his eyes and she thinks the same expression is mirrored in hers. Lydia brings her hands back to his face, kissing him ever-so-slowly. Leisurely. She wants this moment to be suspended in time. She never wants to leave it. Leave _him_.

Stiles’ arms wrap around her body in response, pressing her flush against him again. There’s not a single inch between their bodies, his feverish skin licking at hers, flames that she doesn’t mind getting scorched by. She remembers very clearly the time when his skin felt cold to the touch, his body broken and barely hanging on, and it’s so very different to this beautiful, warm, revitalized young man that came back to her. They have scars and nightmares abound, but more importantly, they have each other. And with him, Lydia knows she can get through everything.

He pushes them back down to the bed, turning them slightly so they’re facing each other, and Lydia wraps her leg tightly around his hip again. Stiles tucks his fingers under the strap of her bra, tracing along the material as he leans down to suck kisses into the curve of her right breast where it spills out of the cup a little. Lydia’s eyes clench shut and she brings a hand to the back of his head, tugging on his hair.

“You’re lucky I find that incredibly hot, but don’t come crying to me when I’m bald by the age of thirty,” he muses. Stiles caresses the soft skin under her boob with his thumb and Lydia feels heat pool in her crotch. He’s equal parts careful and just the right side of forceful with her body; it’s everything she needs from a partner. Someone to treasure her but push her when she needs it. It’s something only a man who knows her and loves her as well as Stiles does can give her.

“I’d tell you I’ll be more gentle, but we both know I’d be lying,” Lydia mumbles, scratching her nails against his scalp. When his laugh vibrates through his body and into hers, she thrusts her lower half against him impatiently, hoping to get him naked faster.

Stiles slips his hand under her skirt, running it solidly up the smooth skin of her thigh in a way that makes a moan reverberate from her throat in the quiet of his bedroom. It's like he's everywhere except  _exactly_  the place she craves him. He grips her thigh, applying pressure with his fingertips, which sink into the tender skin and down into the muscle. Everywhere he touches makes her feel brand new, like nobody’s ever touched her there before. It’s so good that her mind goes foggy with pleasure and she gasps against his lips. He hums in response.

“This is studying, Lydia. Not cramming,” he teases, and the innuendo is so obvious she can't resist.

She rubs her nose against his before whispering against Stiles’ lips, “Really? Because there's certainly some cramming I'd be interested in.”

“Flatterer,” he replies, a spark in his eye that makes Lydia throw her head back with laughter. Stiles presses his lips to her exposed neck, but she can practically feel his smile against her skin. God, she really is the happiest she’s ever been, it fills every nerve in her body. Here, in his bedroom on a Thursday afternoon, she can almost pretend there’s no one else in the world but them.

Stiles trails kisses down her chest, sliding his body further down the bed in the process. He ends up lying between her splayed legs and it makes her squirm with unsatiated desire. Stiles teases one of her nipples through the thin fabric of her bra with his teeth and Lydia yelps slightly, bringing a hand up to her mouth a little too late to stop the noise. He smirks up at her knowingly, a hand tracing the skin of her chest up to her neck where it's hot to the touch from her blushing.

“Had your fun studying yet?” she asks shakily.

He just shakes his head slowly, gaze locked with hers as his hand finds her other nipple, pinching it between his thumb and forefinger. Her eyes fall closed in pleasure. She can feel him reaching around to her bra clasp, fumbling for only a moment, in a way that wouldn’t be Stiles if he didn’t, before unhooking it and throwing it to the floor. He squeezes her boobs firmly in each hand and Lydia opens her eyes when she feels his tongue move slowly upwards through the crevice between them.

“Are you jonesing for a motorboat?”

Stiles looks up at her from between her breasts with a slight eye-roll. “Don’t be crass Lydia, there’s nothing sexy about motorboating.” And he sucks hard on the inside curve of her left breast, dragging a moan from her lips. He leaves two more quick nips of his teeth against the tender skin. Stiles sits back a little, hands cupping both of her boobs as he admires them and the small marks he’s left on her.

“You’re such a boob guy.” Lydia strokes his hair fondly.

“I’m a Lydia guy,” Stiles corrects, dragging his eyes away from her chest to smile up at her sweetly. It makes her love him even more, although that seriously shouldn’t be possible.

He gives her a wink before sliding down her body further, sitting back on his heels between her legs. Stiles runs his hands slowly from her thighs and down past her knees, the rough pads of his fingers electrifying against the smooth skin on her legs. He pauses briefly to massage the muscles of her calves while she simply stares at him, riveted. He lifts both legs to either side of his waist, encouraging her to keep them there, with her hips tilted away from the bed. He reaches under her, unzipping her skirt and sliding it down. Lydia’s hips sink back to the bed, her legs rising upwards as he pulls it off and discards it. Instead of bringing her legs back to his waist, she bends one knee, placing her foot flat against the bed, while her other ankle lands on his shoulder. She smirks and raises her eyebrow at Stiles’ slack-jawed expression like a challenge. He turns his head towards her leg, wrapping one of his hands around her ankle and placing a series of soft kisses against her skin.

“Stop playing dirty,” he says lowly.

“But it’s the only way to play,” she responds coyly, wiggling her toes.

She sees him thinking for a few seconds, planning out his next move. “Two can play at that game, Lydia,” he smirks. And he moves with such speed that Lydia’s barely blinked before both her legs are splayed open on the bed and she literally hears the tear of her underwear as he rips it from her body. He’s down between her legs, blowing air against her wetness, spreading her lips apart, and Lydia can’t  _breathe_. He drags his tongue along her, coming to rest against her clit where he swirls his tongue in a few feverish clockwise circles.

“St-” Lydia chokes on his name, one hand coming to rest on the back of his head while the other ends up buried in her own hair, tugging at the strands fitfully. He’s been working her up slowly for what feels like forever and now he’s diving all in at once and Lydia feels like she’s going to combust.

His mouth moves down to her opening, tongue-fucking her so thoroughly that her hips instinctively arch to meet him. Stiles’ hands travel around, grabbing at her ass firmly as he pulls her upwards and closer to his mouth. Lydia feels like she’s floating, a litany of moans falling out of her mouth that she can hear are getting louder and louder with his rigorous attention.

In a swift movement, one of his hands slides back, palm flush against the base of her spine, supporting her more as his mouth moves back to her clit. His other hand leaves its home on her ass so that he can sink first one finger and then two inside of her, thrusting in tandem with the ministrations of his tongue. The angle is so deliciously torturous that it reminds her of the lit fuse of a firework, seconds away from an inevitable and beautiful explosion of color and noise. Lydia lets out a guttural sound somewhere between a gasp and groan, her brow furrowing as she crests towards the precipice of orgasm at lightning speed. Stiles sucks a little harder on her clit and crooks his two fingers inside her simultaneously and her whole body erupts in a chorus of shaking and juddering that lasts for what feels like hours.

When she comes back to herself, Stiles is grinning up at her, chin resting on top of his hands on her stomach like he hasn’t just made her come so hard she literally couldn’t speak, breathe or think. “You’re stupid,” she mutters, incapable of coming up with an adequate comeback.

“Yep,” he says proudly.

“Flip me over and fuck me,” she requests, reaching a hand down to ruffle his hair.

“Wait, seriously?” he asks, bemused like he’s sure she’s must be joking.

“God, yeah,” her voice is still raspy, which she doesn’t think it should be because as far as she remembers she wasn’t screaming. If she did Stiles’ ears would probably be ringing. “That was ridiculously hot. You haven’t come yet and I can get there again in like a minute.”

“Marry me,” he quips. Lydia chuckles and Stiles grabs her hips, maneuvering her until she’s face down on the bed. She props her head up on her arms and wiggles her ass while she hears Stiles fumbling around in his nightstand for a condom.

“You want me to just…” he begins to ask, hands gripping her hips as his cock slides against her.

“Fuck me, Stiles. Lesson learned, passed the test with flying colors, whatever other studying analogies we can throw in there.” She grins and Stiles laughs. He enters her in one slow, steady motion that sets her body alight again, and it’s like it was waiting for him. She can feel herself opening up beneath him immediately and he leans over her, his body covering hers in a way that with anyone else would’ve felt suffocating but with Stiles just feels safe and warm and natural.

He slides his arm under her body, wrapping it around her torso. It pushes her breasts higher, her hard nipples rubbing against the bedcover with every thrust inside her, making her tingle all the way down to her toes. Stiles sucks gently on her neck before peppering kisses across her shoulder blade. He’s everywhere and it’s  _perfect_.

Stiles removes his arm, placing his palm on the bed to support his body as he begins to thrust harder. He moves his other hand underneath Lydia, rubbing his fingers assuredly against her clit and she squeaks, forehead resting flat on the bed. One of her hands clenches the covers in her hand tightly, the other reaching back for Stiles. He sucks her fingers into his mouth in a move that surprises her, and he scrapes his teeth sharply against the sensitive skin of her fingertips. She’s completely overwhelmed by sensations from every angle. As his thrusts speed up and his fingers become more focused against her clit, Lydia’s heartbeat thumps so wildly it seems like it’s going to beat right out of her chest.

Her fingers pop out of his mouth and he places a soft kiss against her palm and it’s that startlingly tender move that pushes her over the edge. She buries her face in the covers, arms giving her leverage to push back against him as her walls clench around his cock sporadically. Lydia screams her release, not sure if the bed is shaking from the force of their bodies or her powers. Stiles groans loudly, following her into ecstasy with a few hard thrusts that leave her shaking to the core.

Stiles disposes of the condom in the trashcan next to his bed and collapses heavily beside her. Lydia peaks at him over the edge of the arm she’s resting on. He laughs and brushes back her messy hair, giving her a gentle kiss on the forehead that makes her heart stutter. He’ll be the death of her if he carries on like this.

“Wanna ask me again if I’m happy?” she asks tiredly.

“Nah, you’ve convinced me,” he answers, holding his arm out so she can snuggle into him.

\--

Stiles and Lydia walk into prom hand in hand, closely followed by Scott and Malia who came together as friends. Lydia looks around the hall at the blue and silver color scheme, the awkward slow dancing, the cheap twinkling lights. She hears cheesy music filling every inch of the room and she smiles. “This is ridiculous.”

“It’s a rite of passage, Lydia! Have some respect,” he mocks, leaning down to give her a kiss on the cheek that makes butterflies flutter wildly in her gut.

“I’m standing in a prom dress right now,” she says, lifting the skirt of her dress with her hand and twirling so she’s facing him. “Why does this feel so weird?”

Lydia drags him over to an empty table, pushes him down into a seat and settles herself sideways in his lap. He wraps an arm around her hip and places his other one across her legs. She thinks about the first time they did this, and how she sat a seat away from him, pouty and irritated because her ex was dancing with her best friend and she’d been forced into a date with Stiles. The same Stiles who she fell in love with and wants to spend the rest of her life with. Life has a funny way of playing a joke on you when you least expect it.

“Scott and Liam aren’t fighting any monsters? You’re not screaming at anyone? There’s no baseball bat in the limo?” Stiles laughs softly and rests his head against her shoulder. “It’s so mundane. So normal. I don’t think we know how to be like this anymore.”

Lydia places her hand against his chest, feeling his heartbeat steadily through his white shirt. She feels compelled to do that sometimes— to reassure herself that he’s real and he’s alive and he’s  _hers_. She moves her hand upwards along the silky material of his tie until she reaches the warm skin of his neck. Lydia presses her thumb to his jaw, tilting his head up so she can see him and his eyes look so full of love that she can feel her own heartbeat racing in response. Everything else fades away, the sound becoming muted like they’re in their own little bubble. She rests her forehead against his and exhales softly against his lips. “Normal could be good for us”

Stiles hums and leans up to kiss her slowly and softly. It’s becoming familiar. She’s learned the way he kisses, the way his lips cover hers, how his tongue runs along her lower lip, how he gets more forceful and urgent when passion takes over. She loves it when he kisses her. It’s like the final puzzle piece falling into place and the picture becoming clear. He makes a happy sound in the back of his throat as he pulls away, his eyes fluttering open to look up at her. “You wanna dance?”

Lydia rubs her lips together and smirks. “Pass.”

He grins back at her for a second, eyes glinting as he immediately catches on. She can feel his hand clenching tighter against her hip. “You know what, let me try that again...” God, he sounds so grown up compared to the last time they did this. “Lydia, get off your cute little ass and dance with me  _now._ ” He pushes her up onto her feet, giving her ‘cute little ass’, as he so called it, a little swat as he does so.

Lydia turns back to look at him, open-mouthed but impressed. She grabs his hand, pulling him over to the dance floor. She finds them a spot, and then turns towards him, linking her hands around his neck as he wraps his arms around her waist. “That feels like a lifetime ago.”

“And you’re even more beautiful now than you were then. That shouldn’t be possible,” he murmurs. Lydia gives him a grateful kiss, refusing to let herself linger in case she gets carried away. She can’t get enough of him. She’ll  _never_ have enough of him.

“You’re quite handsome yourself, Stilinski.” She moves her hands down briefly to straighten his tie.

Lydia doesn’t want to cry, but there’s something so obviously missing tonight. And it’s her best friend. She’s never going to share this night with Allison. They never talked about it, but she knows they would’ve gotten ready together. She knows they would’ve taken the limo with their dates (and she knows in her mind, that those dates are Scott and Stiles). It’s why she chose this black dress. The sequins on it sparkle under the lights of the gym like twinkling stars. Stars she often looks up at and wonders if her best friend is watching over them. It’s not black for mourning, it’s black for the nights spent running around the woods and saving people. It’s black because there’s darkness in all of them, but it doesn’t have to be a  _bad_  thing. She feels beautiful. Peaceful.

Stiles slides one of his hands up from her waist. His fingertips trail carefully along the skin of her back, causing goosebumps to rise as her heart flutters at how precious she feels in his arms. He places his hand firmly against her neck, rubbing his thumb back and forth against her jaw tenderly. “You okay?”

She smiles softly and rests her head against his shoulder. He automatically pulls her body closer as they sway gently to the slow music. “I’m happy,” she answers. And she is. It’s not a lie she has to tell herself anymore. It’s prom night. She has a boyfriend who she loves more than she ever thought was possible. They’re graduating. They’re getting out.

Stiles’ hand slides through her hair to cradle her head, his fingers finding the spot behind her ear where the scar feels like nothing more than an uneven bump now. She sighs in remembrance, tilting her head up to place a tender kiss against his jaw.

“Prom’s not so bad, huh?” He says sweetly, and she can hear the smile in his voice even if she can’t see his expression.

Lydia clenches the material of his suit jacket in her hands, holding on fiercely. She lifts her head and he lowers his to accommodate for their height difference. It’s a perfect moment, the electric energy right before a really good kiss. She rubs her nose against his in a touch so light it’s barely anything, but it still settles her heart in a way that makes her want it every day for the rest of her life. Lydia lifts one of her hands to the back of his head, nestling in his hair so she can direct the oncoming kiss to her liking. His breath puffs out against her lips and she runs her tongue along the inside of her lip in anticipation, uncaring whether she ruins her lipstick or not. They’ve kissed hundreds of times but when they build up to it like this, it still feels like the first time. They put their hearts in each other’s hands, willingly giving them to someone they know they can trust them with implicitly.

“Prom’s not so bad,” she agrees in a low murmur against his lips. He takes that as his cue to close the infinitesimal gap, his lips brushing against hers softly but with surety. There’s nowhere else she’d rather be than with him in this moment. She lets Stiles kiss her for a minute, her body melting into his as he kisses her leisurely, every gentle move of his lips against hers making Lydia feel warm and at home. Lydia hums into the kiss, sucking on his bottom lip when she can no longer resist participating. His grip on her hip tightens and her lips curve upwards in satisfaction. She pushes her tongue into his mouth, running it along the inside of his lip before his insistent tongue melds with hers, the kiss deepening. Lydia arches up onto her toes, the heels of her stilettos lifting off of the floor as she pushes her body closer to his. Leaving one hand on the back of his head, her other comes down to grip his tie, dragging him into her until space is obsolete.

Stiles gasps against her lips as his tie begins to squeeze a little too hard on his windpipe but he only separates from her for a moment before diving back in, unwilling to stop kissing her for more than a second. Lydia presses an emphatic kiss on his lips before pulling away, her breathing heavy but Stiles’ even heavier. She nudges her fingers inside the loop of his tie, tugging at it until she determines it loose enough for him to breathe normally again.

A tanned hand appears on Stiles’ shoulder out of nowhere, breaking them out of their almost indecent episode. “Be careful, you’re in public. There are  _teachers_  here,” Scott warns with a proud grin.

“Somebody has to show the virgins how it’s done,” Lydia jokes and Stiles laughs heartily before burying his face in her hair. Scott chuckles too, proceeding to take hold of one of Lydia’s hands and kissing the back of it. He pats Stiles on the back and smiles at them both before leaving them alone again. “Speaking of sex…”

“I’m listening,” Stiles answers eagerly, making Lydia grin.  _Always so eager._

“We could just get out of here. Enjoy our own after-party.”

Stiles nods, eyebrows lifting in interest but his response is contradictory, “I think we should hang around for a little while.”

Lydia tilts her head inquisitively, eyes narrowing as she tries to figure him out. “ _You’re_ postponing sex?”

He hums in amusement. “We’ll call it delayed gratification.”

“For what reason?” Lydia asks, sliding a hand slowly but firmly down his chest, feeling the solid lines of his torso as she goes. She tucks her hand inside the waistband of his pants and raises an eyebrow.

“No amount of teasing is going to make me tell you that, Lydia,” he responds, giving her a wink.

She pouts and leans closer, removing her hand from his pants and hooking both of them over his shoulders. “What have you done?”

“I am not the culprit of this, I swear.” He plants a chaste kiss on her lips to try and soothe her worries.

“But you are aiding and abetting, aren’t you?”

“Yes. Yes, I am.”

The music quiets abruptly and the lights get a little brighter, faces of fellow students becoming clearer around the room. “Okay, you miscreants! Listen up!” Coach’s voice bellows out around the room. The microphone is turned up too loud or maybe Coach is just too close to it, either way, it causes several of the students to wince. “It’s uh...apparently my job to announce the prom...whatever this is. Royalty?” He turns back to look at another teacher who mutters something inaudible. “Court? Prom Court, sure.”

Lydia looks over at Stiles, who’s smiling smugly like he knows a secret and she feels ice spike in her veins. “Stiles, what have you done?”

“Me?” he asks innocently. “Nothing. Nothing at all. Scout’s honor.”

“Stiles,” she says sternly.

“I promise you, I haven’t done anything. I just have a contact in admin,” he whispers, eyes soft and reassuring. Lydia feels the tightness in her chest release a little as he intertwines his fingers with hers, squeezing her hand comfortingly.

“Okay, so Prom King is...can I get a drumroll or something?” Coach mutters something mostly inaudible, the word ‘amateurs’ is in there somewhere though. Some students laugh and a drumroll starts up over the speakers. “Scott McCall!”

Cheers erupt from the crowd and Stiles whoops and hollers loudly as a spotlight finds Scott in the crowd. His smile lights up the room but there’s not an ounce of arrogance from him like she imagines there is from so many high school jocks who end up winning Prom King. He’s so endearing. Scott makes his way up to the stage and stands to the side of Coach. Her mom walks onto the stage, placing a cheap crown on his head before sliding a sash over the top carefully, straightening it out so the words ‘Prom King’ are legible over his tux. Lydia can feel the smile taking over her face as she watches him up there. He’s their alpha, their leader and one of her best friends. All of those things and lacrosse captain too. There’s no one better for the honor.

“Alright, alright, settle down,” Coach grumbles, but his demeanor doesn’t match his words. She can see the smile he’s trying to repress over his star student getting the title. “And without further ado…” Coach looks behind him and gestures dramatically before the drumroll kicks in again. “Your Prom Queen is… Lydia Martin!”

She freezes as the spotlight finds her, the bright light making her squint a little. Everybody applauds and she can hear Scott let out a shout of “Yes!” in the distance.

Stiles puts his hands on her arms and kisses her on the cheek. “Congratulations,” he whispers and Lydia feels warm again.

“You didn’t do this, right?” she asks quietly.

“Nope. Just knew about it.” He nudges her forward and finally, her feet start moving towards the stage. Scott comes to meet her at the steps, taking her hand and leading her into the center of the stage.

Her mom comes out, grinning from ear to ear with a tiara and a sash. “Well done, honey,” she says, giving her a quick hug after she’s secured her royal accessories.

Lydia looks out across the crowd of her peers, her friends, the love of her life who’s grinning so big it must physically be hurting him, and she lets her fake smile fade into a real one. This was something she wanted for so long. And maybe it doesn’t hold the same weight as it did when she was fifteen or sixteen, but it’s still an accomplishment she can be proud of. Despite every awful thing that’s happened to her, she’s still somebody people admire. Lydia has almost everything she’s ever wanted. She can let herself enjoy this. As the student body applaud again she moves closer to Scott, linking her arm through his as she turns her gaze to him. He smiles at her sincerely, his eyes crinkling in happiness. He leads her down the stairs to the dancefloor as the music gets louder again and Coach tells everyone to enjoy the night.

“I’ll just keep you for a few seconds before you can reunite with your boyfriend,” Scott jokes as they dance in the empty space in the center of the dancefloor.

She follows his lead and laughs gently. “You can keep me for the whole song if you want. He knew about this and didn’t tell me. That deserves punishment.”

“Thank you for making his dream come true.” Scott’s voice is so heartfelt it makes tears sting behind her eyes and she has to physically choke them back.

“Please don’t make me cry right now, that can’t be the last image they have of me,” she whispers urgently. Lydia sighs and hugs Scott close. “Thank _you_  for...everything. I’m sorry if tonight isn’t what you hoped it would be.”

“It’s good enough,” he replies, eyes soft in understanding. “And you and Stiles can have the limo. I’ll take Malia home.” Scott lifts Lydia’s hand and spins her in front of him, disorientating her. He pulls her in close and then spins her outwards before letting her go. Lydia feels like she’s flying, but she lands solidly against another body.

“Hey there, Your Majesty,” Stiles murmurs, catching her in his arms.

“And who might you be?” Lydia asks as her eyes narrow. “Court Jester?”

He chuckles gently. “It would be my honor to entertain you.”

“Oh, I bet it would,” she mocks. Lydia looks around the gym at all of the people who apparently voted for her and she exhales shakily. “I didn’t think they would still pick me.”

“Beautiful, caring, powerful, insanely smart. Yes, why on earth would they pick you?” Stiles replies sarcastically.

Lydia scoffs and rolls her eyes. “Walked around the woods naked, spent time in a mental institution, and a startling affinity for screaming very loudly and often. Yeah, I’m a Prom Queen for the ages.”

He pulls back slightly and lifts a finger up to her chin so she’s looking directly at him. “The ability to overcome those things is admirable, Lydia. All of that happened to you and you’re _still_  valedictorian. You deserve this.” She lets his words sink in and straightens the tiara on her head with a gentle smile.

“Let’s go.”

“Hmm?”

“Let’s go, Stiles. Scott says we can take the limo. Let’s go home.”

/

Stiles lies under Lydia on the soft black leather inside the limo, lights glowing brightly around them as the road rumbles below. His tie has been pulled loose and his jacket is thrown haphazardly across the floor. There’s a mirror above them on the ceiling and when he cranes his neck he can see lipstick marks littering his jaw like she’s branded him. Lydia’s still in her dress but it’s dipped slightly, her boobs straining to escape the confines of the material.

“Mmm,” Lydia hums as she picks up the champagne bottle they found waiting for them with a note from Scott when they made it back to the car. She takes a swig— they’ve forgone the option of glasses even though the limo is well stocked, it feels dirtier this way, more primal and messy— like they’re embracing their youth while they can.

Lydia leans down and kisses him with a mouth full of champagne letting him sip it from her lips. Stiles moans happily into her mouth, wrapping his arms tighter around her waist. They’re not drunk on it, only tipsy, but maybe they’re a little drunk on the night and the love and being happy. It’s exhilarating.

He moves his lips away from her mouth and trails kisses down to her neck, sucking harshly on her pulse point until she groans in pleasure. Lydia places her palms either side of him, pushing her body upwards which in turn makes her lower body press harder against his. The limousine takes a turn sharper than usual and Lydia squeaks as she’s thrown from her place perched on top of him and falls to the floor before he can stop her. He freezes, eyes wide. “Lydia?”

There’s a pause before Lydia laughs loudly beside him, hair shaking as her chest moves up and down with the happy noise expelling from her lungs. Stiles grins and turns his body so he’s lying sideways on the leather seat and looking down at her below him. He reaches out and sweeps some of her hair away from her face, hand caressing the soft skin of her cheek and Lydia’s giggles finally begin to subside. She looks back up at him with a gentle and content smile that makes him feel so at peace he doesn’t know what he ever did without seeing that smile directed at him for the last eighteen years of his life.

She pushes herself up a little and holds onto her dress while she swings her legs under her. The position almost reminds him of a mermaid sitting on the rocks beckoning him towards her with a mystical energy that’s irresistible. But before he can move closer to her she’s already pushing herself up to catch his lips with hers. His eyes flutter closed and he feels heat sweeping through his entire being like molten lava encompassing everything in its path. It’s beautiful but destructive, setting alight to every nerve-ending within him until he feels somewhat numb. Stiles moves a hand to the back of her neck and lets it slide up into her messy hair. He pushes his tongue into her mouth and she moans softly, opening up to him like it’s the most natural action in existence. He gets lost in it— in her— everything else falls away.

When the limo drives over a bump, the kiss breaks and Stiles doesn’t open his eyes, prolonging the feeling for as long as possible. He feels Lydia’s hand on his thigh and his eyes flutter open as Lydia maneuvers him into a sitting position, her head between his legs. She rests her cheek against the fabric of his pants and looks up at him, eyes adoring but a laxness and calmness to her body that reminds him of a cat basking in the sun, relaxed and focused.

She rubs her hand teasingly against his thigh and he groans, feeling his pants get inexplicably tighter as his arousal intensifies. His head thuds back against the leather and his eyes close, his attention completely on Lyda between his legs. She laughs softly and places a soft kiss on his other thigh and his eyes open, looking down at his redheaded girlfriend with her eyebrow raised enticingly.

“Tease.”

Lydia walks her fingers gradually up his thigh as she murmurs, “It’s only teasing if I don’t plan on following through.”

“You’re gonna blow me in a limo?” Stiles asks, hands clenching hard on the leather below him. His hips fidget underneath her touch, energy buzzing just below the surface of his skin in anticipation.

Lydia maneuvers herself into a kneeling position with minimum struggle, graceful even when it shouldn’t be possible. She gives him a wicked smile and is just leaning forwards when the car stops abruptly. Stiles reaches out a hand to her shoulder to stop her from tipping over and Lydia blinks around the vehicle which clearly isn’t going to start moving again. “Are we...are we home already?”

Stiles reaches beside himself for the curtain, peering outside. He sighs in disappointment. “Yeah, we’re at your house.” Her mouth ticks up in amusement. “What’s so funny?”

She leans up, pulling his head towards her and planting a long kiss on his lips. “You just looked so...crestfallen. What happened to delayed gratification?”

“A man can only restrain himself for so long,” he murmurs, kissing her again.

“Here’s what we’re gonna do…” She begins, so close the words are practically pressed into his lips.

He runs his fingers along the tendrils of her hair, tugging slightly when he reaches the end. “Uh huh, I’m listening.”

Lydia moves his hands to her waist and starts standing up. He takes the physical cue and lifts her to her feet. “You’re gonna give me a sixty-second head start, and then you’re going to come and find me.” There’s a glint in her eye that he thinks means very good things are on the horizon.

Stiles leans forward and looks up at Lydia. She brings her hands to his shoulders and rubs them firmly. “What will be waiting for me at the end of the sixty seconds, Lydia?”

She smiles and her eyes shine brightly in the soft pink and blue hues of the limousine interior. Lydia leans down and grabs the discarded champagne bottle and shuffles over to the door, picking up her heels on the way. She turns back and winks at him before uttering just a single word:

“Me.”

Stiles grins and sucks his bottom lip between his teeth. He closes his eyes and counts carefully. Images flood his mind, ones of Lydia dancing in the twinkling lights of the prom, up on stage receiving her tiara, above him, below him, kneeling between his legs in the limo. His mind is in overdrive, excitement taking over all of his senses. He thinks it’s been a little longer than a minute, but a little extra time for her to prepare whatever idea she’s concocted can only be a good thing. Stiles slinks out of the limo and thanks the driver for the wonderful evening with a shake of his hand.

He strides up to the front door that Lydia’s left ajar for him but the foyer is still dark. He follows the sound of soft music into the kitchen and spots the increasingly empty bottle of champagne on the counter. If the twinkling he can just about glimpse in the Martin’s pool from the outdoor light wasn’t already a big clue as to where he’s meant to go, Lydia’s heels next to the back door would be like Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs directing him home.

Stiles smiles and picks up the champagne bottle, kicking off his own shoes and socks beside Lydia’s. It’s a striking image, one that makes him think about the future and his and Lydia’s footwear side by side in a home of their own. The music is a little louder when he gets outside, clearly arranged to play through the garden speakers. He walks casually, enjoying the way it feels like the perfect climax to the evening, the woman of his dreams waiting for him when he gets there. Like she was for so long and he didn’t even realize.

He spots Lydia standing on one end of the pool and he slows his steps to stand on the opposite side.

“You took your time,” she greets in amusement. She has one hand pressed into the fabric of her dress and the light sparkles off of the pool and onto the sequins of her dress making her appear like a cosmic entity. A bright star in the dark sky. He’s the luckiest person in the world and god does he know it.

“What matters is that I got here,” he replies and he’s not just talking about tonight. He got to her in time, he got to come back to her, he got to have this.

Lydia grins, understanding his meaning. She drops the hand in front of her and her dress falls elegantly, pooling around her feet. His breath catches in his throat as he watches her slide her hands behind her back and unclasps her strapless bra. She drops it beside her on the ground and then, with a wicked smile, she brings her hands to either side of her black lacy thong and pushes it down until it lays in the center of her prom dress. She stands up straight, wearing nothing but her ‘Prom Queen’ sash and tiara and it’s genuinely the most heart-stoppingly wondrous image that will be burned into his retinas until his dying day. The sash almost covers her breasts but not quite, and the curves of them displayed either side of the silver sash makes his arousal that had simmered slightly in the interlude come flaring back at lightning speed.

“Fancy a swim?” she asks coquettishly with a tilt of her head. She crouches down briefly and skims her hand over the water, purposely turning her body to the side so he can’t see between her naked thighs. He lifts the champagne bottle to his lips and finishes off the last of it as he stares at the endless amount of smooth skin on display before him.

“You’re going to kill me, Lydia Martin,” he replies as his hands come up to tug the tie away from his neck and puts the bottle on the ground beside him. He undoes the buttons of his shirt without losing eye contact with her. Her eyes are so dilated they look almost black with intoxicated desire and love. The smirk on her lips makes him frustrated that there’s a whole pool stood between them because he just wants to kiss her all night long until the sun comes up in the morning.

Well...maybe not _just_ kiss her. Definitely more than just kiss her.

His eyes drop down as he undoes his belt and right as he’s about to push his pants down he hears a loud splash and his head shoots back up. A few seconds later Lydia’s head is bobbing above the surface, a grin on her face as she shrugs a shoulder at him and his slack-jawed expression. He rushes to get the rest of his clothes off as fast as possible and then dives in after her, surfacing right in front of her.

“Welcome to the after-party,” Lydia murmurs huskily as she places her arms on his shoulders and pushes her hands in between his shoulder blades, bringing him closer to her. His own arms slip around her waist.

“I’m feeling very welcomed.” He smiles before kissing her ferociously. She moans into his mouth and he slides one of his hands down to her ass. “You lost your crown, Your Majesty,” Stiles utters against her lips before he nips at her bottom lip.

She breaks away from his mouth to look around and Stiles takes the opportunity to lean down and plant kisses along her chest. He hoists her up slightly and wraps his lips around one of her nipples, sucking the water away from her skin. Lydia brings her hand to the back of his head, gripping his hair between her fingers in response to his ministrations. She reaches her other hand out and before he knows it she’s put the plastic tiara on his head.

“Now you’re Prom Queen.” She laughs loudly and Stiles loves hearing her so carefree and happy. The fact that he can make Lydia feel that way still shakes him to the core. It still seems as though he’s in some sort of dream-like state where all his wishes came true and he never wants to wake up.

“Well, I’m definitely nowhere near as beautiful as my predecessor.”

As Lydia’s laughter ends, she brings her body even closer to him and presses her lips to his shoulder and the scar that’s slightly paler than the skin surrounding it. He walks them slowly until he has Lydia squeezed against the side of the pool. Stiles slides his hands down her body and lifts her legs up to wrap around him.

“Stiles,” Lydia begins, eyes darkening with arousal. There’s nothing between their bodies and he can feel the heat radiating from her body. “We’re not having sex in my pool,” she whispers and he can tell she’s trying to sound firm but it comes across weak to Stiles’ ears as he rubs his thumbs across the underside of her breasts. He kisses along her jaw, nipping at the skin occasionally as he goes until he’s tugging at Lydia’s earlobe and sucking on it. Stiles can hear her breath hitch in her throat. “Seriously, pool sex is nowhere near as good as it’s romanticized to be. I’ve done my research.”

He hums in agreement and lets one of his hands drift down between them. His other hand goes to the small of her back for support as he begins to rub his thumb against her clit and she gasps, hand clutching at his shoulder and nails digging into his skin. He smirks against her skin and sucks hard on her neck like he knows she likes. “You were saying?” he says smugly.

“Shut up,” Lydia murmurs and she feels so pliable in his arms, so comfortable and safe. Stiles chuckles into her skin and moves his hand down, sinking two of his fingers into her entrance. She’s so hot and silky it makes his mouth begin to water.

“So we won’t have sex in the pool,” he agrees, pulling his fingers out of her abruptly. Stiles runs his hand along one of her thighs teasingly.

Lydia makes a disgruntled choking noise and then grabs his hair in her hand forcing his face up to meet hers. “Excuse me?”

“You said we couldn’t have sex in the pool. So we’re not having sex in the pool, Lydia.” He grins at her cheekily.

“Now who’s a fucking tease,” she growls, pulling him closer and kissing him harder than he thinks she ever has before. He loves it. Even when she bites his lip hard enough to make his fist clench. “Finish what you started, Stilinski.”

He reaches up to his head and removes the tiara, putting it back on her head again. “As you wish, Your Majesty.” Stiles pushes his fingers inside her again and rubs her clit with his thumb. He starts slowly, and every time Lydia’s breath hitches he gets a little bit faster. When she whimpers and sucks hard on his shoulder he crooks his fingers upwards and it’s only a few more thrusts before she shudders against him and he can’t hear the music or the water anymore, he can only hear Lydia’s satisfied moans and heavy breathing. Stiles kisses her softly as she comes down and waits for her to finally start kissing him back before he pulls away.

“You know I had a plan,” Lydia says cheerfully.

Stiles chuckles at the irony. “And how did that work out for you?” he asks. He doesn’t just mean tonight.

Lydia recognizes his tone and sticks her tongue out at him. “You ruined it.”

“I tend to do that, don’t I?”

“We can still do this plan though.” She smiles and he can’t resist placing kisses all over her face, her cheeks are still warm and rosy from pleasure and his heart stutters at the fact that he caused that.

“I’d like to hear this plan.”

Lydia presses her hand against his chest so she can create a little bit of distance and untangles her legs from around his hips. She drops a few inches in the water as her feet find the bottom of the pool and then she leans up to him again. Lydia whispers against his lips, “First one to the shower gets to choose the position.” And she’s gone like a flash, diving beneath the surface.

“Cheat!” Stiles shouts and then rushes after her. He leaps out of the pool and she’s already halfway to the back door. “You are a dirty cheater, Lydia Martin!”

“Sore loser, Stilinski!”

\--

[6:37 pm] Lydia:  _When you said you couldn't wait to come home, where exactly is home to you?_

[6:40 pm] Stiles:  _Home is wherever I'm with you._

[6:41 pm] Lydia:  _That’s...a song. A really cheesy song._

[6:41 pm] Stiles:  _Home is wherever cows go moo?_

[6:42 pm] Lydia:  _Oh my god._

[6:42 pm] Stiles:  _Home is wherever ghosts say boo?_

[6:43 pm] Lydia:  _I mean...not far off._

[6:43 pm] Stiles:  _Home is wherever I sniff glue?_

[6:44 pm] Lydia:  _I'm not responding to you anymore._

[6:45 pm] Stiles:  _Home is wherever balls aren't blue._

[6:48 pm] Stiles:  _Lydia._

[6:50 pm] Stiles: _Lydia, that was my best one!_

[6:55 pm] Stiles:  _Jokes aside, you're my home. We could go anywhere, and as long as you’re with me_ — _I'm all good. I just want to spend my life with you._

[6:56 pm] Lydia:  _I miss you._

[6:57 pm] Stiles:  _I love you too._

[6:57 pm] Lydia:  _That’s not what I said._

[6:58 pm] Stiles:  _Isn't it though?_

\--

As Malia drives them back to Beacon Hills, Lydia shivers in the backseat, nestled in Scott’s hoodie. The cold has swept into every inch of her body, so much so she can’t even really feel the pain of where she was shot, the bullet wound on her hip likely angry and borderline dangerous. Scott found a blanket in the boot of Malia’s car and wrapped it around her, but she’s still out in the middle of the night in nothing more than a hospital gown. She’d call herself stupid if she’d had any say in the matter, but she didn’t come out here of her own volition.

“We can call him if you want to,” Malia says sincerely, looking in her mirror back towards Lydia.

She shivers and shakes her head. “No.”

Scott chimes in, “Lydia, he’s going to kill us when he finds out you got shot and we didn’t tell him.” There’s worry pouring off her alpha, but he knows more than anyone what it was like when they lost Allison. She’s not letting it happen again.

“No.” She sighs heavily. “This isn’t on you. It’s me he’s going to be angry at because this was my choice. You guys just went along with it. And I’m thankful for that, I know it’s not easy.” It’s not easy _without him_. He’s so good at this stuff, at figuring things out for them. But he’s also so easy to lose. Four of them got shot and that could’ve easily been Stiles had he been here, or it could’ve been worse. If anything, the events that have transpired since her vision have proven that she made the right choice by not dragging him into this. She misses him and she wants him here so badly, but none of that is more important than him being okay. It took everything in their arsenal to get him back last time. She needs him as far away from Beacon Hills as  _possible_.

“You could’ve died, Lydia,” Scott says solemnly. And she can hear it in his voice, the pain of all those bullets ricocheting around his home, hitting his mom, his dad, her, Mason. It’s the highest and most serious casualty count they’ve ever had in one night because none of those wounded had healing abilities.

So, yes, it’s true that she could’ve died. And it’s true that Scott and Malia could have died too. But if she makes it out of this war alive, she wants a future with Stiles, and that future is only possible if Stiles is living and breathing and making dumb jokes that she pretends to hate. Lydia doesn’t get to be Stiles’ wife if there’s no him waiting for her at the end of the aisle. She’s going to protect their future with everything she has. It’s worth him being mad at her for a while because of a few white lies.

\--

When they get back to Lydia’s house, she walks with a kind of exhausted purpose to her room, Stiles following behind her carefully. She sinks into a seated position at the end of her bed and just... _waits_.

The lights are off, and Stiles closes her bedroom door solidly behind him, turns his back to it, sighs and then his voice cuts like a knife through the silence. “So we need to talk.”

Lydia just nods, smashing her lips together. She stares at the floor, too scared about what she'll see if she looks into his eyes. The disloyalty, the disappointment, and potentially a little less love than there was before.

“I'm waiting for an explanation,” Stiles adds after a while. He sounds surprisingly patient. Not at all how Lydia imagined he'd be.

“I was expecting you to yell at me,” Lydia answers in an amused tone that does nothing to cover her nervousness.

“I might have earlier, but after seeing my best friend claw his own eyes out...let's just say I'm not really in a yelling place. I want you to tell me everything, Lydia. I gather there's a lot to tell,” his voice shifts from stunned reverence to a semblance of betrayal that makes her heart clench in overwhelming guilt.

“My fear was losing you.” She finally shifts her gaze up to connect with his. Stiles’ eyebrow twitches slightly, his eyes softening in understanding. “I know what it’s like when that fear becomes reality. And I wasn’t going to do it again.”

“Here’s the thing,” Stiles begins, pushing himself off of the door and walking towards her. He crouches down in front of her and takes her hands in his. It reminds her of the time they talked about the string on his crime board, how red means unsolved and how his eyes made her feel things no other boy’s ever had before. “You’re not the only one with something to lose here.”

“I know.” Lydia squeezes his hand tightly in hers. “But I had a choice to make. And it was a choice between telling you everything and you coming home to fight, or lying to you and letting you stay in Virginia where you would be  _safe_ ...” Her eyes trace along his face, relearning the lines of his features, counting his moles, studying the curve of his lips.  _Oh, it’s been so long since she’s kissed him_.

Stiles shakes his head. “That’s not okay with me.”

“Are you seriously telling me you wouldn’t do the same?” Lydia’s voice gets louder, more defensive.

“Oh, I would. But that doesn’t make it right.” Stiles sighs heavily, deep in thought. “We need to change this pattern of behavior, Lydia. Right now. We’re partners, right?” he asks. And she hates that it sounds like a genuine question, they’ve been partners even longer than they’ve been in love.

“Yes,” she insists, rubbing at his knuckles with her thumb.

“Full-on-honesty from here on out. We’ve been doing this for a long time, and we’ve proven that we make a damn good team facing things side by side. That doesn’t change just because we’re in a relationship, okay? The chance of one of us losing the other increases exponentially if we’re going it alone. So we’re not doing this again.” Stiles brings her hand up to his mouth and presses the softest of kisses to the center of her palm, and then another to the Mount of Venus by her thumb. Lydia smiles gently and her hand instinctively drifts away from his mouth to caress his jaw and the beginnings of stubble there.

“Okay, yes, I see your point,” she agrees begrudgingly, but Lydia knows he can see the spark in her eyes.

He pulls himself up from the floor, her hand falling away from his skin and he stands above her, holding out a proffered hand like he’s conducting business. “Deal?”

Lydia grins at the show he’s making of it and stands up too. “Deal,” she agrees, shaking his hand.

“Well now that’s out of the way,” Stiles says flippantly, and leans down to kiss her. Lydia’s heartbeat stutters in her chest and she feels like she’s floating, like every part of her life is suddenly brighter and better now she’s back in his arms. There were moments, rare and fleeting but present nonetheless, when she thought she might never have this again. Lydia wraps her arms around his neck, hands sinking into his hair as she lifts up onto her tiptoes so she can kiss him back fully. He brings his own hands to her waist, fingers finding purchase on her back to support Lydia in her endeavor to get as close to him as possible.

They can’t get close enough, so Stiles spins them around and sinks down onto Lydia’s bed. She never loses contact with him, immediately climbing into his lap as her fingertips drift down his cheek. He’s so sure and solid against her. This is what she hadn’t wanted to lose, what she never _ever_  wants to lose.

Stiles’ hand runs up from her waist and along her ribs until he’s cupping her breast over her clothes. Lydia moans against his mouth and presses a few short kisses against his lips before breathing becomes a necessity and she has to take a break. When she looks down, Stiles’ eyes shine up at her, so full of wonder that she’d think he was watching galaxies form above him, not simply gazing at her.

Lydia lifts her hand to his temple, a feather-light touch against his skin as she moves slowly across the arch of his eyebrow; then the corner of his eye, which crinkles slightly as he beams under the attention. She moves her fingers into his hair, rubbing them softly against his scalp until his eyelids flutter shut. Lydia inhales a gasp as she leans down into him, pressing a soft kiss against his lips that he’s just starting to reciprocate as she pulls away to rub her nose against his.

He flips Lydia over, pushing her body higher up the bed as he kneels between her legs. She can see him kicking his shoes off, a dorky smile on his face that she’s missed more than she realized. Stiles crawls up to her and is just about to start pushing her blouse up when she freezes, her hand automatically pressing against his in a stopping motion. He tilts his head at her, a concerned expression overtaking him as he looks up into her eyes.

“I...there’s still things you don’t know.” Lydia’s brow furrows worriedly.

“Okay,” Stiles answers softly, lacing his fingers with hers and squeezing reassuringly. “So tell me.”

Lydia has to look away from him because this more than anything else she’s kept from him feels like deceit. A betrayal that she shouldn’t have enacted. Lydia pulls her hand away from his and lifts her blouse a little with shaky hands, then pushes the edge of her black pants down until a white dressing is bared. She hears and almost feels the small intake of breath from her boyfriend.

“What happened?” he questions, hand moving to cover hers. When his eyes find hers they look furious with concern. “What happened to you, Lydia?”

She sighs and breathes deeply for a few moments, wondering where to begin. “Scott, Malia, Argent and I had a plan to distract Gerard, Monroe and their men using Liam and Theo. The plan was to get into his bunker and get rid of his weapons but he knew we were coming and the weapons weren’t there. Scott and Malia got trapped, set off an alarm and nearly ran out of oxygen. They would’ve died if it weren’t for me and Argent. I had to use my scream to break down the door.”

He nods. “Well now I understand why you knew you could get through to rescue Jackson, but I’m still not seeing the part where you got  _hurt,_  Lydia.” He places his palm flush against her abdomen and the muscles underneath his touch contract a little.

“I’ll get there,” she promises. “So the whole day I was seeing and hearing things that weren’t actually there. The windscreen of the car cracked, and then I was hearing shell casings. I had a vision of Scott’s house while I was in the bunker,” she explains.

“They were premonitions?” he infers.

Lydia moves one of her hands to his bicep, appreciating the surety of him under her touch. He never leaves. Even when she does terrible things, he never leaves her. “Yes. But I didn’t quite realize that at the time. Not until I was standing in the McCall house and we were about to be ambushed.”

“Who was it?” he asks, a modicum of threatening aggression slipping into his voice. She tightens her hold on his arm and shakes her head.

“We don’t know. Somebody from Monroe’s army, but not her. She had an alibi.” Lydia takes a few moments to remember that night. The way everyone was talking around her about Nemetons and a plan to eradicate all supernaturals; but she had the visceral feeling of impending death, all the signs she couldn’t make head nor tail of suddenly becoming so clear, like ducks all aligning in a row. “I felt it right before it happened, and I screamed out to get down.”

“You saved everyone.” There’s this haunting mixture of pride and solemnity in his voice. “You saved everyone but you still got _shot_.”

She purses her lips. “It wasn’t even that serious. It didn’t hit any vital organs. I was out of the hospital in less than a day, Stiles.” Lydia doesn’t tell him that she really shouldn’t have been up and about that soon. It would only serve to make him angrier and she considers what's done to be done.

“See, now our deal is even more important. You are  _not_ allowed to keep something like that from me again.” He lies down beside her on the bed and stares up at the ceiling, his face pinched with despondent fury.

Lydia turns into him and rests her chin on his chest. “I’m not  _allowed_ , huh?” she questions, a lilt in her voice as she tries to turn the conversation lighter.

He looks down at her with exasperation. “You know what I mean.”

She walks her fingers up his chest, deftly undoing a button before sliding her hand underneath the fabric to touch his bare skin. Lydia can feel the thump of his heart against her and she burrows closer towards him. He instinctively wraps his arm around her body.

“You didn’t tell me you got shot either. _I’m_  going to make a full recovery,  _you’re_ down a toe.” Lydia raises her eyebrows mockingly.

Stiles scoffs. “Oh my god, don’t remind me. It’s so gross.”

Undoing a few more buttons, Lydia slides his flannel away and places a gentle kiss to his heart. “We’ve got enough scars for a lifetime, just add it to the list.”

“So you still love me even though I only have nine toes?” He buries his fingers in her hair, massaging the tips into her scalp in a way that makes her feel so safe that tears prick up behind her eyes.

“Hmm. I’ll have to think about it,” she says teasingly.

Stiles moves his hand down to her neck, pulling her up into a tender kiss. “Mean.”

She nips at his lip lightly. “You love it.”

“Well, obviously.”

She melts into him, every muscle in her body relaxing for the first time since the night she was supposed to leave for college. This feeling right here, lying in the safety of Stiles’ arms, is what she's wanted for as long as she can remember. Back when she was choosing a dress for the winter formal that she was only attending with him out of penance to Allison, she never would've dreamed that he would be the love of her life. But Lydia truly doesn't want to imagine her life any other way.

“Also, Scott and Malia?!”

“Yeah, even I don’t know how to explain that one.”

\--

“Yeah, buddy, that’s all good. We’ll meet you there.” Stiles hangs up the call and slides his phone into his pocket with a sigh. He climbs the staircase, footsteps echoing against the wood as the sound penetrates the silence. Without knocking, Stiles pushes the door of the soundproof room open and smiles softly as his gaze lands on Lydia, who’s typing away on her computer. He walks over to her and sweeps her hair over one shoulder, bending down to give her neck a soft greeting kiss as his eyes flick over the screen.

“Working, Stiles,” she murmurs, but her hand comes up to meet his own where he’s placed it on her shoulder.

“I know. And I know I said I wouldn’t disturb you, but Scott needs our help,” he tells her. Stiles rests his other hand on the arm of her office chair and plants another soft kiss on the top of her head. He can see the soft smile appear on her face in the reflection of her monitor. “Plus, you work too much.”

“You don’t work  _enough_ ,” she chastises.

“I am  _insulted_. Did you know I have more job offers than anyone else in my class?” he retorts smugly.

Lydia rolls her eyes. “You may have mentioned it once or, you know, three dozen times.”

He laughs into her hair. “See? I’m amazing.”

“You have a unique background of expertise. That’s why they want you. Plus it’s not like you’re considering anywhere other than McCall’s branch.”

“But the offers, Lydia!”

He massages his hands into her shoulders, working over some of the tense knots he finds and the redhead hums in relief. She does work ridiculously hard. And now that she’s finished at MIT, they’re going to be moving in together in Washington D.C. Lydia’s chosen to pursue her Master's at George Washington. He let her know that he would be unequivocally supportive of her wherever she wanted to go and whatever she wanted to do, but she insisted on coming to D.C. with him. He still remembers the night she told him that she was certain, that she was coming to be with him because she loves him, that two years of long-distance was already  _too long_. It was the best sex they ever had.

He’s practically bouncing off the walls at the prospect of getting to live with her. They’re moving in in a few weeks, and being the sentimental fools that they are, they’re choosing to do a cross-country road-trip like they did after senior year. Except this time there are no goodbyes at the end of it, just a lifetime of good mornings.

“You already have Parrish sending you updates every day, you basically already work there,” Lydia comments, snapping Stiles out of his thoughts.

“True.” They haven’t finalized their plans for after college yet, but it is likely they’re gonna move back to California and he’s going to join Agent McCall’s new supernatural branch of the FBI. Parrish was recruited almost immediately, and they work closely with his dad because the supernatural activity is still drawn to Beacon Hills due to the Nemeton. He thinks it’s the best fit for him, the place he can do the most good— they won’t necessarily stay in Beacon Hills, choosing somewhere further afield but still nearby. Lydia has expressed complete support for the idea. He knows she feels like she can help people more in close proximity to their hometown as well.

Lydia nods and tilts her head back to look at him, he can’t resist placing a kiss on her lips this time. “Did Scott say what the problem was?”

“He and Argent found a sixteen-year-old boy that was being chased down by Monroe’s minions.”

“He okay?” she asks.

“Scared. Broody. Typical teenager. Scott wants as many of us there as a kind of ‘meet the pack’ thing before we come up with a plan to get the hunters out of LA. The kid must have some intel, they wouldn’t have attacked him in broad daylight otherwise,” Stiles explains.

With a sigh, Lydia pushes herself up from the desk. “Duty calls,” she says with exasperation, but there’s a small hint of a smirk on her face.

“The sooner we get the bitch, the sooner I’m getting you down that aisle,” he reminds her. They had decided not to have a wedding until Monroe and her cronies were handled, lest she infiltrate their wedding day and tries and kill the many supernaturals that would be in attendance. Having a wedding that goes off without a hitch is unlikely because it’s  _them_ , and they don’t have the best track record, but they’re not risking anyone’s lives for the sake of it.

“I suggested eloping, Stiles. It’s not like I’m preparing to jilt you at the altar.” She’s said it a hundred times (but he still wants to hear it a hundred more)— Lydia wants to  _marry him_. And she doesn’t care how they do it. It’s Stiles who wants to wait until the time is right. He wants to stand up at that altar, say vows that he’d spent weeks, months,  _years_ , working on— and pledge to love her with everything he is until the day he dies.

“Yeah, and you’re crazy to think I’d ever elope. I’m showing the whole goddamn world that Lydia Martin is marrying me. I can feed off the jealousy it’ll cause for  _years_.” He wraps his arms around her waist, pulling her flush against his body as he smiles down at her.

She winds her arms around his neck, pushing herself onto her tiptoes to plant a tender kiss on his lips. “You’re an idiot.”

He shrugs as if to say ‘duh’ before planting a kiss in return on her cheek. “Yeah. but you agreed to marry me. So what does that make you?”

“In love.” Lydia sighs happily, and god, does he love that sound— like,  _really_  loves that sound. It’s probably in the top ten list of Stiles’ favorite Lydia sounds, especially when he does something to cause it.

“Yeah, you are,” he grins, lifting her off the floor and spinning her around in circles, causing her to squeal cheerfully.

“You’re still not allowed to wear a bowtie though,” she murmurs knowingly when he finally puts her down.

Stiles just laughs and kisses her again.

\--

Big moments or small moments. Happy moments or sad moments. They all contribute to the story. They all have meaning. And they all lead to the evolvement of Stiles and Lydia’s love for one another. Because some people do deserve a happy ending.

Or is it just another beginning?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And there we have it!
> 
> If you can, please take the time to review! I would love to hear your thoughts and feedback!
> 
> You can find me on [Tumblr](http://hartmaddox.tumblr.com) or [Twitter](https://twitter.com/tvlois)!


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